[Users] Understanding processing (and pre/post-)

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Removed GDPR wrote:

> After reading the manual and before asking here I have searched the
> web for the intended use of pre/post processing and I have found no
> useful answers. I have also done a simple test with pre-processing
> to apply a color to messages based on a header. Still this
> experimentation does not really answer the question as it reveals
> nothing about the intended workflow, what rules should go into
> filtering, what in pre/post/processing and in what situations all
> this is aimed to be used.

If you click "Configuration" in the upper menu and then click
"Pre-processing..." in the submenu, the title of the window that
opens is "Processing rules to apply before folder rules".

If you right-click a folder and click "Processing..." in the context
menu, the title of the window that opens is "Processing configuration
for folder #mh/Mailbox/Something (with "Something" being the name of
the folder you right-clicked.

If you click "Configuration" in the upper menu and then click
"Post-processing..." in the submenu, the title of the window that
opens is "Processing rules to apply after folder rules".

From those, you can see that there's an order in which the rules are
applied, which gives you specific control over what happens when and
where, also making it possible for you to set rules to override rules
that have previously been set by other filters (for example, coloring
a certain type of message red when it arrives in the inbox by using
pre-processing and then coloring it green when it's put into another
folder by using folder processing).

There's probably quite a bit more to it than that, but it's my basic
understanding of how they work. I've never gotten so fancy with my
filters, just making everything a pre-processing rule. I might want
to look into mixing things up a bit by taking advantage of the power
provided by these three different ways of coming at the filtering of
messages. Thanks for bringing this up.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.