Scam detection is based on multiple references to other URLs in the message. That's all. It can't tell if a message is political, commercial or even pornographic in nature.

Your stated criterion only confirms my unease. Scammers are not stupid - why would they put URLs in a scam email?

Non-scam political emails routinely use URLs - which begs the question - why are they being given SCAM alert status while commercial scams still get through undetected?

And who determines which political URL is a likely scam?

Perhaps it's time to move away from the sole reliance on URLs and onto key words that are typically associated with scams? I can give you a dozen straight off if you are genuinely interested in fixing this problem.

That's what the Junk Controls are for.

There is no, I repeat no, scanning for any perceived political bias.

Your comment on junk controls is noted. But a SCAM is not SPAM or junk, nor is either generally contained in a political email. My query was never about political bias and my follow-up query concerned why there is sole reliance on URLs since that will not solve the SCAM problem.

You are telling me what is, I'm suggesting what Mozilla might do to eliminate the scam tag on emails of a political nature, whether of the Left or Right or anarchist or whatever. It is in the very nature of political content emails to often contain multiple URLs,

Can you see the point I am making?

The actions taken by scammer and those taken by political organizations are often exactly the same. They want to redirect you clicks on links to locations other than what they say they are linking you to.

In the case of scammers it is to fool you into revealing personal information that they would not normally be privy to.

In the case of your political group it is nothing so mundane. They want to know which links you clicked, did you forward the links to some one else that clicked and all the information they can glean about you as an individual so they can target their next email more closely to your views. You always read the articles on save the planet.... we will tell you how green we are. conversely if you r interests appear to financial they will spruik their fiscal skills to you.

In the end result they both do almost exactly the same things at a technical level. I suppose because they are really both trying to get information by stealth.

If you do not like the scam warnings, Turn them off. It is as simple as that.

Yes, dead easy to turn them off - but why have them at all? I chose to subscribe to newsletters etc from various reputable outfits with political agendas; they may glean information on my preferences re links, no differently from cookies on web pages, that's ok, they're welcome. I don't expect some politically uniformed geek from Mozilla telling me it may be a scam

At worst they may be spam (junk). They can be dealt with, as you say. A scam is when someone is trying to trick me out of money, personal information or similar. As in some wealthy widow whose husband was in charge of oil revenues or central bank in some Third World government and she finds me trustworthy.... Or some parcel delivery company claiming to be holding a parcel for me, or a bank with which I have no account wanting me to update my details.

You can't see that the Mozilla criteria to call "SCAM" are wrong?

Related help article in case you didn't find it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbirds-scam-detection#w_thunderbirds-automatic-scam-filtering

Thanks, I realize you are trying to assist, and the latter part of that link has some relevance even though it is prefaced with the revealing admission:

"Thunderbird's detection algorithm isn't perfect and, unlike its spam filter, does not learn or adapt based on your email flags. If you are getting too many false alerts, you may consider (at your own risk) disabling it: .."

Guess I'll just have to learn to live with what I get and accept that actual scam emails (i.e. criminal) will continue to arrive without scam warnings.

Two thoughts if you want to be a little more active about this situation:

• Tell the organizations you care about whose bulk mail is getting flagged this way to look at the support article so they can learn about why their messages are getting flagged and decide whether they want to avoid it in future mailings. They might not be aware of the problem.

• If you have suggestions for improving scam detection in phishing messages, by all means submit them. There's only limited development on Thunderbird, but this is an important feature for less attentive users. https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-thunderbird

Yes, thank you, good practical (and realistic!) suggestions.