Thunderbird:Help Documentation:Dealing with Junk E-mail
Eurgh...this needs a lot of work.
Dealing with Junk E-mail
Mozilla Thunderbird supports many different methods for dealing with junk e-mail (also known as "spam"). This document will describe the ways Thunderbird can deal with junk mail so you don't have to waste your time doing so.
Thunderbird's Junk Mail Controls
Junk mail controls can be set separately for each email account or, if using the global inbox feature, to all local folders. These are the available options for determining how Thunderbird should recognize and treat junk mail.
- White Lists
- A white list is a list of contacts whose messages should never be treated as junk mail
- Do not mark messages as junk mail if the sender is in my address book prevents messages from being automatically marked as junk mail if the sender is a contact in the selected address book
- Handling
- Determines what to do with junk mail when it is received
- Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail to will automatically place junk mail into the specified folder upon arrival
- Automatically delete junk messages older than will automatically empty the chosen junk folder and totally delete the messages
- When I manually mark messages as Junk allows the user to determine whether to put manually-marked junk mail into the Junk folder or delete it immediately
- When displaying HTML messages marked as junk, sanitize the HTML
- Logging
- Enables logging of junk mail
Adaptive Filtering
Thunderbird's primary method of dealing with junk mail is an adaptive filter. Thunderbird's adaptive filter actually learns how it should classify e-mail by learning from your habits.
If you consistently mark a certain type of e-mail as junk, Thunderbird will learn that that type of e-mail should be marked as spam in the future. However, e-mail that you wish to receive will not be marked as spam, because Thunderbird's filter is entirely based on your actions.
The filter improves as it watches how you sort your e-mail, and with time the filter will reach nearly 100% classification accuracy. More important, however, is that the filter is intentionally conservative in what it marks as junk mail. If Thunderbird can't quite decide whether an e-mail is junk or not, it will mark it as not spam. It's that simple -- after training, the filter simply doesn't create false positives.