#767 new
Meindert

Smart mailbox conditions questions

Reported by Meindert | May 10th, 2014 @ 07:50 AM

Are the Anys in the smart mailboxes OR or XOR? They should be OR, right? But I'm getting some behavior that is making me wonder.

I'm troubleshooting a complex smart mailbox that is not picking up everything I intend to be in it. I've set up a second smart mailbox that excludes anything in the first, and includes some keywords that are showing stuff that should be in the first. I'm going through checking and unchecking checkboxes in the conditions trying to figure out what's wrong. Somehow it seems to be that messages that match two (not one) of the ANY conditions are not showing up.


Another question: I'm a little vague on the meaning of the various Address conditions.

For: "Englebert Humpledink" engledude.humps@alpha.beta.gammahedron.domain.co.hk

-- Any Address (no specifier): picks up any substring match in that entire address, like bert, humps, co.hk? How about spaces?

-- Domain: picks up any substring match in that entire address to the right of the @ sign? Like domain.co.hk, domain, main, ain.c? Are the periods delineators that cannot be crossed?

-- Third level searches in domain, second in co, third in hk? Full match, substring match?

-- Final level: What? hk or alpha?

-- Name: The stuff to the left of the engledude.humps@? (in double quote marks in my example)?

-- User: Same as Name? same as the text to the left of @?

-- No specifier: Everything in "Englebert Humpledink" engledude.humps@alpha.beta.gammahedron.domain.co.hk? (Ignoring double quotes and angle brackets? And spaces? And @?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny May 10th, 2014 @ 08:51 AM

    “Any” means OR and “All” means AND. (XOR is actually supported in the internal query language, but this is not available in the GUI.)

    As always, it is best if you can reduce the problem to be as simple as possible. In this case, a single message which is unexpected part (or not part) of a smart mailbox.

    When using the “is” or “is not” comparison methods then MailMate matches on the full string. When using “contains” or “does not contain” then MailMate matches on any substring.

    The specifiers work like this (IIRC):

    From: "Englebert Humpledink" <engledude.humps@alpha.beta.gammahedron.domain.co.hk>  
    From ▸ Name: Englebert Humpledink  
    From ▸ Address: engledude.humps@alpha.beta.gammahedron.domain.co.hk  
    From ▸ User: engledude.humps  
    From ▸ Domain: alpha.beta.gammahedron.domain.co.hk  
    From ▸ Top Level: hk  
    From ▸ Second Level: co  
    From ▸ Third Level: domain  
    From ▸ Final Level: alpha
    

    The ordering of specifiers is alphabetical which in this case makes it a bit confusing (the above would be better). Note that when using “is”/“is not” then the popup in the text-field can often be used to see what kind of values are expected.

  • Meindert

    Meindert May 10th, 2014 @ 11:30 AM

    That makes sense, thanks.

    Two more questions:

    I had assumed that choosing Mailboxes > Any > All Messages would let the conditions apply to everything. But just now I discovered that I get a different set of results among the mailboxes Archive, All Mesages, and Sent Messages. Shouldn't Archive and Sent Messages be subsets of All Messages?

    If I want to apply my conditions to all my mailboxes or to a selection of them, do I choose these mailboxes using Mailboxes > Any > [mailbox name], or do I use Conditions > Message-id > Is In > [mailbox name], or are they accomplishing the same thing?

    On the order in the menu, can you have a sort field and a display field? Working on specifying Japanese databases and web applications I learned early to always have a sort field if it might ever be needed, since machine sorting of Japanese characters is nonsensical (pronunciation cannot be automatically deduced). But if you're using some fixed interface thing from Apple that doesn't support a sort field, you're stuck, I guess (other than the kludge of prefixing menu items with numbers).

  • benny

    benny May 10th, 2014 @ 12:27 PM

    Yes, Archive and Sent should be subsets of “All Messages” (if you have not added conditions to “All Messages”).

    Use the Mailboxes pane for choosing mailboxes. Do not use “is in” unless there is no other way. This is a much less efficient search method even if the result is the same.

    I'm creating the menu items myself based on a configuration file (with the application bundle) named specifiers.plist. I have not defined any way to provide a display order in that file (but I could/should do that).

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