What is message filter criterion "Untitled" and could it cause some of our filtering problems?

I used Eudora for around two decades, then migrated to Pandora in April 2021, At the moment my Pandora installation contains 2946 mailboxes, 346772 messages,  14828 attachments, and 3041 filters.

For most of us, it would be highly inconvenient of not  impossible, to use a mail client without the ability to apply filter logic to message handling.

After a few battles and lots of head scratching I seem to have most of the filters working properly, but on the last month or two have found some incoming messages being moved into quite unexpected mailboxes. I could not see any rhyme nor reason why those incoming messages were being moved to the wrong mailboxes -- and not the same mailbox all the time, but to mailboxes all over the place (in differing folders).

Until today, that is, when out of the blue a notion came to me that allowing the "Untitled" criterion might be THE cause -- or at least one cause -- for some incoming messages going astray.

So I'm asking Brana and Pandora users to think about this. ... What is the meaning and significance of a filter criterion being "Untitled" (which is not explained in the built-in Pandora Help)? What's the reason for having the "Untitled" criterion for ANY filter?

Because "Untitled" is the default criterion value (correct me if I'm wrong),  I have never intentionally set any criterion to "Untitled" but a number of my current filters do have this value. They just slipped past my guard, it's so easy to not notice that ypu dodn't change this to some other value such as "From" or "Any Header" or whatever.

I strongly suspect that this causes the unexpected behaviour, causing an incoming message to finish up in the wrong mailbox. Do you agree with this analysis?

I was right on the verge if manually editing the Filters.xml file and changing all occurrences of the string Criteria="Untitled" to the value Criteria="«Any Header»" but hesitated, and decided to put it to the vote in this forum before proceeding with this operation.

And I'm asking Brana to consider removal of "Untitled" as an entry in the Basic Criteria drop-down list, instead usinf "Any Header" or "From" as the default ..

I could be way off beam. Does the above make sense?  I reckon that some hard thinking is needed on this..

Tony Austin wrote:I used Eudora for around two decades, then migrated to Pandora in April 2021, At the moment my Pandora installation contains 2946 mailboxes, 346772 messages,  14828 attachments, and 3041 filters.

For most of us, it would be highly inconvenient of not  impossible, to use a mail client without the ability to apply filter logic to message handling.

After a few battles and lots of head scratching I seem to have most of the filters working properly, but on the last month or two have found some incoming messages being moved into quite unexpected mailboxes. I could not see any rhyme nor reason why those incoming messages were being moved to the wrong mailboxes -- and not the same mailbox all the time, but to mailboxes all over the place (in differing folders).

Until today, that is, when out of the blue a notion came to me that allowing the "Untitled" criterion might be THE cause -- or at least one cause -- for some incoming messages going astray.

So I'm asking Brana and Pandora users to think about this. ... What is the meaning and significance of a filter criterion being "Untitled" (which is not explained in the built-in Pandora Help)? What's the reason for having the "Untitled" criterion for ANY filter?

Because "Untitled" is the default criterion value (correct me if I'm wrong),  I have never intentionally set any criterion to "Untitled" but a number of my current filters do have this value. They just slipped past my guard, it's so easy to not notice that ypu dodn't change this to some other value such as "From" or "Any Header" or whatever.

I strongly suspect that this causes the unexpected behaviour, causing an incoming message to finish up in the wrong mailbox. Do you agree with this analysis?

I was right on the verge if manually editing the Filters.xml file and changing all occurrences of the string Criteria="Untitled" to the value Criteria="«Any Header»" but hesitated, and decided to put it to the vote in this forum before proceeding with this operation.

And I'm asking Brana to consider removal of "Untitled" as an entry in the Basic Criteria drop-down list, instead usinf "Any Header" or "From" as the default ..

I could be way off beam. Does the above make sense?  I reckon that some hard thinking is needed on this..

Tony,

I am unable to locate a Basic Criteria drop-down list entry of Untitled nor do I have any Criteria tags of Untitled in the Filters.xml.  I do not have Untitled as the default criteria value when I create a filter.

Could the Untitled criteria have slipped in through the Eudora to Pandora filter conversion process?

Butch[/b]

I suppose that's one possibility, Butch, but I have no clue why "Untitled" appears, I certainly didn't key it in myself, across multiple filters. They do seem to be older filters, so perhaps there was an "Untitled" option ion earlier releases of Pandora (just a wild guess).

I just discovered a minute ago that it's possible to blank out (and save as blank) the Basic Criteria field,  For example, select "From" and press the De; kay on the keyboard, which you might do accidentally. When that happens, if you examine the Filters.xml file the Criteria field gets stored as "Untitled". Brana, this should be prevented (in your next release of Pandora  maybe).

Further testing shows that you cannot blank out the right combo box  in this way (the conjunction operator "contains" and "starts with" etc).

I have just edited Filter.xml and changed all occurrence of "Untitled" to "Any Header" (and will be surprised if this has any deleterious effect.

Tony,

I would suggest that you send this issue in a Pandora Help | Send Feedback | Report a Bug email to Brana.

Butch