grack.com

It took me a while to figure something out that works, but I’ve figured out a way to organize my filters in Thunderbird.  Since I have something like 40 rules, editing and understanding them was started to become difficult. 

My solution?  I started adding fake filters as separator lines between the groups of filters.  They now look like this:

--- People Filters ---
Person A
Person B
--- Mailing Lists ---
List A
List B
--- Miscellaneous ---
Spam
Viruses

I would love to have filter folders or some other form of hierarchical organization, but this will do for now. It’s much easier to understand your filters when you can see them executing as a block of similar filter types. I prefer my people filters to execute first, followed by mailing lists and opt-in notifications (bank, Yahoo, Google, etc.) and, finally, my SpamAssassin-tagged-message rule filters.