Thunderbird, blocking cross posts

Yup, blocking "Newsgroups" "contains" will get any group where the name given is a subset of the actual name.

There are a number of ways of getting round this, but one would be:

You can add another filter for "Newsgroups" "contains" "uk.legal.moderated", and set the action to "Stop Filter Execution". Now place that one higher up in the list of filters than the cross post one. That will stop the cross post filter seeing the message.

In some respects you are better off going for a default "kill all" approach, and then whitelisting the ones you are actually interested in. Otherwise the trolls can just add a new random group from time to time to pop back into the feed.

So a pair of filters, one that matches any of the groups you want, and stops filter execution, followed by a separate "kill all cross posts filter" will do that since it won't run on any message that matched the whitelist one.

Have you figured out or found a way to do wild card or regex matching in Thunderbird. I tried a couple of add-ins but they never worked for me.

It is the one thing I really miss from the venerable Turnpike.

I use Turnpike for news and T Bird for mail. I suppose you are all on 64 bit stuff.

Regex, no (although to be fair, I have not actually tried since I can usually get the result I need with the conventional filters and a bit of lateral thought.

Wildcard matching you already have partially, since there is typically an option to match on text with criteria like "begins with", "contains", and "ends with".

(you can also get more combinatorial logic power if you are prepared to craft the filter rules files yourself rather using just the GUI)

The generic one that would be useful is contains ", " two or more times. Since it would avoid having to manually white list genuine cross posts that may be relevant in a couple of groups.

It is a common characteristic of troll fodder that it is typically cross posted to 3 or more groups at a time. "alt." and ", alt." work for me.

But sometimes the odd one gets through.

Oh yes. I am manually setting them up and adding custom fields to make the routing to local folders for emails work as I want them to.