Re: [Evolution] Filter question / feature request

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 09:55, Carl Alexander wrote:
> Is there a kind of a "smart wild card" that can be used in filter that
> could be used to match a set of strings? Ideally, a set of strings by
> reference?  

Currently no.  I have a whitelist setup, but i just did it manually. 
But then, i dont have many friends, so it wasn't that hard.

> What I would like to do is use a filter to whitelist all addresses in my
> address book before chucking a message to my normal filters that check
> spam detection message headers added by my ISP. The motivation is to
> catch the occasional false positives generated by the spam detection
> headers added by my ISP that do not have my personal address book to use
> as a white list.  I think the ability to have a filter to whitelist my
> address book would be very powerful; Imagine not having to manually
> update mail filters when you update your palm pilot. You just sync, and
> boom, your whitelist is updated too in this scenario. (And yes, I know
> this type of feature would require fast string matching code to not be a
> huge CPU sink. Something better than a simple linear compare would be
> cool.)

Naah it doesn't have to be anything tricky.  If its based on the
addressbook, you just query that, if not, then you just use a hashtable.

There's already a bug request for the feature to basically whitelist
anyone in your addressbook.  The main difficulty in implementing it is
that the filtering process is threaded, but the addressbook api's
aren't.  And you can't really just dump all the addresses to a table,
because 1. thats pretty slow, and 2. not very useful if you have a
massive global addressbook you're looking up (and generally they'd have
something easier to match against, like a common domain).

Maybe a reasonable and pretty simple alternative might be to have a file
of strings or regex's to match against.  Though its really only a
stop-gap, since ideally it would work via the addressbook.