thunderbird auto-categories

[teledyn]

Thunderbirdreally needs Categories, some simple pre-sorting of email types into manageable buckets.

I rely heavily on the Gmail Category tabs; in Promotions, Alerts or Forums I typically only need to read the subject lines, so I Select All, maybe uncheck one or two, and click delete. This also reduces mailing list noise in my inbox tab making important things easy to notice.

It would be possible, but very tedious to teach tag filters. The beauty of the Gmail case is it is self-learning. Anything classed wrong is simply dragged and dropped or menu selected to a new home.

If this was in Thunderbird, I could switch in a moment! I expect it's non trivial but I wonder if this might be implemented using a very simple Markov chain, like the early spam filters, so it could refine its decisions over time.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[bernibird]

I was a happy user of the Opera browser with its built in email client back in the days before they dropped support for Linux in 2013.

There, one could create a new folder (not physical folder, more the concept of a view I guess), and tick a checkbox "learn from Email".

Then you could either dragndrop emails from the inbox view onto the folders in the sidebar or forward them with the context menu etc.

The concept was simple but powerful: Each folder acted like a Ham-Spam folder for your desired context and learned bit by bit which emails fit, and which not.

The hole logic was stored in a simple text file, so you could inspect for each folder the keywords which were stored there

The thing was fast as light, performed quite well after some training ... and this was in 2004 ... more than 20 years ago.

Can you feel my pain being beamed back in the Email stoneage, having to use silly handmade filters for my dozens of projects for dozens of clients and dozens of other topics?

I can't believe the whole world is so retarded that they WANT to do the stuff manually?

I am searching for email client or even a plugin like that like this for the past 12 years ... to no avail.

[bernibird]

@teledyn (Seems my first comment was lost in transaction, so a new try)
20 years ago (!), the feature you ask for was already implemented in Opera's built-in email-client. The principle was crazy simple (I guess):

One could add folders to the sidebar which were no physical folders but more or less database views.

One could drag-and-drop or forward emails via context menu from the inbox to these foilders. Nothing special.

But in each folders settings was a checkbox "learn for email" or sth like that. On activating that, a simple HAM-SPAM logic was performed on incoming emails (apart from the normal SPAM folder). At first all emails went into nearly all folders, but through dragging them to their correct destination, the folders quickly learned their purpose.

Your imagined use case with just 3 folders would have been a very easy task. I set up dozens of even nested folders for all kinds of fields of interest, and it was enlightening sometimes to see the same email show up in different folders, because they shared a similar context which I myself was not aware of before.

As far as I can recall, the hole shebang was stored in a simple text file with sections for each activated folder with the extracted keywords and their "HAM/SPAM ratings".

The application was super fast, the search compared to Thunderbird just amazing and it handled my ca. 20.000 emails I stored very reliably.

In 2013 Opera dropped their Linux version and I think the whole email client soon after, and since then I suffer from severe phantom pains.

Since then I am searching frequently through the web for a replacement, plugin etc. to no avail. I can't wrap my head around the fact that still today the majority of users and developers are still fine with fumbling around with manual filters while a simple mechanism for that problem existed already 2 decades ago.

The autobucket plugin which showed up in 2020 to address this issue is just horrible. I do not know anything about Thunderbirds architecture, but I fear that it is too static or messed up to facilitate such a feature. Otherwise we would have seen it already appear, right?
But we might still hope ...