Most of us arrange the filters into a logical order suited to what they do and how they do it. Alphabetic ordering has little relevance in such a case.

I guess you are filtering on senders' names where there is probably little interaction between your filters.

I don't know of a sorting tool for filters. My search for one has simply thrown up other users with similar queries. For example,

http://codeverge.com/mozilla.support.thunderbird/ordering-msg-filters/1449659

So you could try sorting your filter rule files in a competent text editor. I'd suggest Notepad++.

"Alphabetize" - there's an ugly example of verbing a noun.

Zenos said

Most of us arrange the filters into a logical order suited to what they do and how they do it. Alphabetic ordering has little relevance in such a case. I guess you are filtering on senders' names where there is probably little interaction between your filters. I don't know of a sorting tool for filters. My search for one has simply thrown up other users with similar queries. For example, http://codeverge.com/mozilla.support.thunderbird/ordering-msg-filters/1449659 So you could try sorting your filter rule files in a competent text editor. I'd suggest Notepad++. "Alphabetize" - there's an ugly example of verbing a noun.

Logical order? Doesn't make any sense since the message filtering is nearly instantaneous, and I don't care what order it's done in. I occasionally need to update or delete filters and would be a lot easier if there was an option to arrange them alphabetically by default so I could find the filter I want more quickly, but apparently there isn't.

<Sigh> I guess you didn't read through the discussion I linked to.

You need to understand that the filters are applied serially in the order in which they are listed in the filters dialogue, working from top to bottom.

This a contrived example, but…

Say I receive messages from a service that likes to send me digests of material collected from various sources. They don't use a static "from:" address, so I can't simply rely on the sender being in my address book, which would in an ideal case whitelist this source as not-junk. The content is such that it tends to be mistaken for Junk.

So I build a filter (#1) that recognizes some part of the content and can then file these messages away safely.

If I also have some filters (#2, #3) for working with Junk, then it's better for my recognition filter #1 to process the message before the junk handlers #2 and #3 see it. Unless I artificially name these filters such that their names would set them in both logical and alphabetical order, I'd hope you can see that the order in which the filters are run is part of their function and has little relevance to their names.

Many of us use a "catch-all" filter which processes the few messages that have been ignored by all the other filters. This one, by necessity, MUST be the very last one.

That's why a simple alphabetic sort of filters hasn't been offered.

In the general case you DO need to care what order it's done in.