Mike Hoy wrote:
why i think thunderbird sucks..
i have filter set up to kill this "why i think FC3 sucks!" thread and a few others. but thunderbird only applies the filters once the emails are downloaded. So it's a nice way to put all of your emails away when you're done reading them but not for killing threads like this one.
Unfortunately, it's logicaly impossible to kill e-mail threads by subject until the mail client has seen the subject!
In standard Internet e-mail, the subject line is part of the e-mail header.
Most ISPs use POP3 for client-bound e-mail. This is a very simple Internet protocol. Normally a client simply downloads an entire e-mail (including headers), and by the time the client has worked out that the subject isn't wanted, then it's too late: the rest of the e-mail is already coming!
It is possible to use the TOP command to merely get the message headers, but this is listed as "optional": not all servers support it. More importantly, I believe that there is no standard way to get the rest of the message *without* getting the headers as well. So you'd have to download the headers, check that you want the e-mail, then download the headers and the rest of the e-mail. On a mailing list like this, for example, unless you kill lots of threads, then you're going to be downloading the headers twice for nearly every e-mail, and you actually download more.
With SMTP, the oldest standard protocol, there is no way to interrupt an inbound message once it's started coming while still telling the sending mail server not to try again.
IMAP is a much newer and much richer protocol. It's also not much used by ISPs because it supports keeping messages on the server, and the ISPs want the e-mail off their servers as quickly as possible!
It does have support for retrieving subjects, and even for getting the server to search by subject and delete the results. I can't see any indication (quickly checking the RFC) that this is optional, but I don't know how much client software supports it: anyone?
That's rather longer than I expected. Sorry about that.
James.