
A Way to Speed Up Message Filtering?
I have a lot of message filters. They take a long time to run. Right now there is an individual filter for each sender, directing the message to a subfolder. I am wondering if it would be much faster to use an 'or' condition: "If sender is 'Dr. Jones' or 'NYU Langone' or 'Medicare' move message to Inbox->Health".
Also is there a big timing difference between "sender is..." and "sender contains..."? I usually use "contains" in case a site sends from different user names.
All Replies (1)
I think perhaps we should start with how many is "a lot". I have less than 30.
Really I do not see message filtering taking more than a few seconds, it is the downloads that are relatively slow. But I explicitly do not have any form of anti virus scanning my mail and I do not have them scanning the files in the Thunderbird profile folder as both things can slow things to a crawl without any meaningful increase in actual security.
If you are still using a platter disk, your should seriously consider limiting the windows search and index service access to the profile folder as I have found that actually made Thunderbird shudder it's way through initial downloads. Since having a SSD drive this has not really been an issue, but that is because they are so fast, not because the overheads are any less.
The two things I mention do not exclusively affect filtering, but both have significant impact on performance in general and filtering by extension.
The default filters do not have an explicit, or even implied AND, each line being considered as an additional constraint and only executed if the mail is still not meeting prior constraints (So an OR). This can be significantly enhanced using the filtaquilla addon and javascript. But that is much more complex than point and click filtering. It is most certainly not for most people.
Be aware that you can filter on which address book the mail sender is in. So if you have say a Health Providers address book, you could filter everyone in it to a common destination. Simply adding a new sending address to that address book would see the address automatically filtered.
It is also relevant to consider the order of execution, if your intent is to make things faster. Filters are run in the order shown in the list, so if you have a high volume sender (I am some mailing lists with hundreds of mails a week) having them filtered and moved first means they are excluded from the next and subsequent filters. So the "lots" of filters only get executed after most of the mail in the folder is already moved out. That automatically means faster as they are invoked less often.
Finally