Comments and changes to this ticket

• 

  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.

• You flagged this item as spam.
  

  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 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).