It is much better to have Thunderbird Junk filter dealing with junk and use Message Filters to filter good emails. Have you set up your Junk controls and have you trained the inbuilt junk filter? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages

Additional good help info..........

Good info on general use of the Message Filter:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/organize-your-messages-using-filters

Does not use wildcard expressions, hence why you train the inbuilt Junk filter which uses Bayesian filtering.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29#Wild_cards

FiltaQuilla is a useful addon for regular expressions:

• https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/

I use the Tbird junk filter also, but it yields very little. My email delivery comes to me through a commercial spam filtering service (www.spamchek.com), and they are pretty good, but they sometimes do not respond quickly to new patterns and this was one that I could do very easily. I do not feel that the Junk mail filtering - which I assume is mostly Bayesian "AI" - is as effective as certain rule-based filters. So I have rule-based filters that set the Junk flag and then I have a Junk folder that gets forwarded to SpamChek daily to help uimprove THEIR filters.

I think all you need to do if you want to use a filter is use the term 'contains' for the invariate part of the address.

In the example quoted - which is a real example - the invariate part is in two pieces with the variant part in the middle. I suppose that it can be done by having each of the two invariant parts in separate filter triggers, but that will use up the filter table much faster.

Have a look at https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filtaquilla/ for more information.

It offers regex matches for subject and body as well as the executing of javascript. I would think it should meet your needs.