Thunderbird:Help Documentation:Dealing with Junk E-mail: Difference between revisions

<p>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.</p>

<h2>Thunderbird's Junk Mail Controls</h2>

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.