Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!

I have been using Thunderbird as my email client of choice for many years, it is the hub which allows me to manage all the emails I get: work, multiple personal addresses, etc. As of today my combined mail folders are about 30GB and counting. Still, Thunderbird has been running rock solid and I had no issue so far.

I have to say that I make extensive use of folders, labels and message filters. These features combined allow to effortlessly manage a high volume of emails by filtering, sorting, tagging, dispatching emails; greatly reducing the amount of manual work needed to process then read them.

As an example, I receive a lot of emails notifications from GitHub, both for work and personal OSS projects. I also tend to follow activity of repositories which I find interesting; but I do not want to have to go through all these notifications myself. A few years ago I adopted the following strategy:

1. Create folders or subfolders for each repository:

• github/work/repo1,
• github/work/repo2,
• github/perso/repo3,
• etc.

2. Create a first filter rule for each repository to automatically move GitHub notifications to their respective folders. This can be achieve by detecting notifications@github.com using a condition of the form From is notifications@github.com and adding a Move Message to action.
3. Optionally, I create rules to automatically mark as read any message which is not directed to me specifically (e.g.: via direct mention of my GitHub handler, PR request, issue assigned, etc.); especially on very active repositories. This can be achieved by detecting things like mention@noreply.github.com or assign@noreply.github.com in the Cc field.

GitHub has a full page of documentation describing all the values you can use to filter email notifications. This is really useful. For example I tag emails where I am directly mentioned in red but notifications about discussions that I was involved in but not directly mentioned with blue. This allows to filter at a glance what I really need to check, versus what I can check later. In practice, more than 90% of notifications do not need to be checked manually. This is huge!

Unfortunately, as the number of filters grows, I found the built-in interface to not be very convenient. Finding or editing rules can become a pain. Fortunately, Thunderbird stores all the filters for a given account in a single, plain text file named: msgFilterRules.dat, located in your Thunderbird profile folder. So I decided to write a library which allows to manipulate these rules through a minimal and type-safe API; in TypeScript.

The goal of the project is to allow developing more high-level tooling to read, transform, extend, update the rules while not having to worry about the low-level parsing details. It would also be possible to store the rules in a nicer format then use the library to produce the final file which can be consumed by Thunderbird.

To install the library: npm install --save thunderbird-msg-filters.

You can then use it to parse a msgFilterRules.dat file which you can find in your Thunderbird folder (one per email account configured):

import { parse } from 'thunderbird-msg-filters';

// A typical `msgFilterRules.dat` could contain this raw value.
const rules = parse(`
version="9"
logging="no"
name="rule 1"
enabled="yes"
type="17"
action="Mark flagged"
condition="OR (subject,contains,foo) OR (subject,contains,bar)"
name="rule 2"
enabled="yes"
type="17"
action="Mark read"
action="JunkScore"
actionValue="100"
condition="ALL"
`);

You can also format rules to the same original format:

import { format } from 'thunderbird-msg-filters';

const rules = format({
  version: '9',
  logging: 'no',
  rules: [
    {
      name: 'rule 1',
      enabled: 'yes',
      type: '17',
      actions: [{ name: 'Mark flagged'}],
      condition: 'OR (subject,contains,foo) OR (subject,contains,bar)'
    },
    {
      name: 'rule 2',
      enabled: 'yes',
      type: '17',
      actions: [
        { name: 'Mark read' }
        { name: 'JunkScore', value: '100' }
      ],
      condition: 'ALL'
    },
  ]
});

The library is currently very young and will probably contain bugs, so use at your own risks. Feel free to use it and open an issue for any feedback!

What’s next? I plan to use this library to store the message filters rules in a separate location and synchronize it potentially between multiple computers. The nice thing is that the rules can now be expressed in a typed language (TypeScript) which will give me more confidence about their validity. It is also much easier to manipulate them from a single file, in a familiar developer environment (i.e.: your editor of choice) than through the Thunderbird interface.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/remusao/thunderbird-msg-filters/