[MlMt] Another question about rules

[Randall Gellens]

On 9 Apr 2025, at 7:48, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 9 Apr 2025, at 16:25, Henry Seiden wrote:
>
>> I can click on a complete Rule or an Action and copy/paste the data. 
>> My version is the latest (v6243) but I believe several earlier 
>> versions have similar capabilities.
>
> No, this only works for copy/pasting entire rules. I think the other 
> users was trying to copy/paste single (or multiple) conditions or 
> actions in order to, for example, merge 2 rules.

Yes, exactly. I was trying to consolidate rules.

> To be honest, I don't really know how hard this would be to implement. 
> Especially drag'n'drop. Copy/paste context sensitive menu items for 
> all actions or all conditions would likely be easier.

It would be handy to be able to drag conditions or actions from one rule 
to another, or to be able to select the contents of a rule and paste 
them inside another rule and have the conditions get added to the 
conditions of the pasted into rule and the actions get added to the 
actions of that rule. But, to be honest, I think other rule enhancements 
would be more broadly useful. For example, Mac Eudora had a couple of 
extremely helpful features with its rules: first, you could select a 
message and then option-click to open the rules window, and the rules 
that matched the selected message would be highlighted. Second, each 
rule showed the date when it last acted, which made it easy to delete or 
update obsolete rules.

If you were to implement the first feature, I'd suggest making it a menu 
item (perhaps "highlight rules that match selected messages," similar to 
"apply rules to selected messages") rather than opening the rules with a 
bucky-bit. That made it too obscure for many users to know about.


--Randall