The email address is not really a part of spam processing in the junk filter.

However see. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls

I don't understand this. When we mark an email as junk, isn't the program supposed to remember that address as spam? Otherwise, what is the point? I get dozens of email a day from the same few email addresses, and no matter how much I mark them as junk, they still end up in my inbox.

I have gone through my mailboxes, marking good addresses as not junk, and junk ones as junk, but it makes no difference at all.

Not exactly, it can be setup to add spam@example.com to a permanent don't bother me but it has to be more or less `trained` take a look here for how to set up baseline configs and re-train junk filter(s):

How to filter junk emails with Xspamscore headers

Basically any attempt to use email addresses to determine if something is junk is doomed to failure in the long term. Regularly we see people here complaining that their friends have just started spamming them because they were not very careful with their email address and contact lists.

Then you have the other end of the extreme and you can create a filter that places all mail from addresses not in your address file into junk.

But with either approach you need to regularly check the spam folder for ham that the computer thinks is spam. You will always have some in your inbox, the tighter you try and squeeze the more good mail gets included as spam. So in the end you view more spam than before trying to undo the incorrect inclusions.

Seriously I do not know how people get so much spam. I have had one of my email account for 15 years, a Hotmail one. Another at Google since it was in Beta. neither gets much in the way of spam, and in both cases Google and Hotmail remove most of that to their spam folder before I get a look in. But I am talking less than 20 items a month in both. With Google getting the most false positives.

I used to get 2 or 3 spam messages per day. Then I had an encounter with an online company who tried to rip me off. Within 3 days of calling them on it, my spam count went through the roof. Not hard to figure out what happened there...

I had to discontinue my ISP filtering of spam. They kept blocking legitimate emails from family back in the UK, saying that the ISP was a spammer. Given that British Telecom provides most UK email access, it is a bit harsh to block *all* their email addresses. At the time, as I said, I was only receiving a few messages. These days it is probably 2 or 3 *hundred* per day.

I still fail to understand why it doesn't recognize addresses which I have marked as spam maybe 30 times that same day. If it *doesn't* try to remember addresses, then why do we mark addresses as junk? If there is no way for it to remember an address, then I would be just as well off hitting <delete> as <junk>.

In the past, the program has made a reasonable effort, and once I marked a persistent address as junk, those messages would be filtered with no problem. In the past few weeks, it seems to have stopped doing that.

I have had this address for several years, and it is intertwined pretty thoroughly with my online life, so I don't want to have to change it.

Nobody has given a valid reason for my original question - if the program doesn't try to match marked junk addresses, then why is there any point in marking them?

Did you read the article Matt posted above? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130257#answer-895382

If you want filtering per sender email address see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/blocking-sender

Good luck with that.

bloke557 said

I still fail to understand why it doesn't recognize addresses which I have marked as spam maybe 30 times that same day. If it *doesn't* try to remember addresses, then why do we mark addresses as junk? If there is no way for it to remember an address, then I would be just as well off hitting <delete> as <junk>.

Spammers use "stolen" legitimate email addresses for most of their spam. The address your spam comes from could well be your mother or your children, especially these days when social media contacts are often used in conjunction with your email address to send spam.

They also regularly change email addresses because all these folk set up block lists on email addresses. Hence any attempt to use an email address are a spam filter is basically doomed to failure. Instead Thunderbirds spam filter uses Bayesian mathematics to intelligently learn what the content of a spam email looks like in your opinion. That process is usually slow as fast learning equates to more false positives.

But this information is all in the link I provided. As well as lots of details on how to make learning faster and add-ons to refine the process. It is therefore fairly obvious you posted before you read the content provided.

I read the links provided, but nothing has answered my question...

I spent ages going through marking 'good' addresses as not junk, as one of the articles suggested, but it made no difference.

You tell me why using email addresses is doomed to failure... Then *why* do we mark messages as junk at all? Does this make sense? I have accepted that the program is not going to filter my junk properly - although earlier versions of it did much better - but just *what* are we doing when we mark a message as junk? This is a curiosity thing rather than a 'tell me what to do' thing. There is a junk button there, and we dutifully press it when a spam message appears, but what is it actually *doing*? If it is not making *some* attempt to learn junk addresses, then we may as well just be hitting <delete> instead...

The junk controls count the number of appearances of tokens (I guess this means "words") in your messages and tries to correlate these frequencies with the junk status you set as part of the training. So when an incoming message contains a large enough number of words which have been associated with junk messages, it too will be marked as Junk.

May I suggest you look at the JunQuilla addon since it makes the junk classification process a little more visible and gives you some extra tools.

http://mesquilla.com/extensions/junquilla/

It specifically doesn't include sender addresses in its analysis since these are invariably stolen or spoofed. If you really are lucky enough to be plagued by spammers stupid enough to keep re-using the same "from:" addresses then by all means add them to a filter. Or you could add them to a specific "spammers" address book and use an "is in my "spammers" address book" filter rule.

I have tried this. The list keeps getting longer and longer and the spam keeps coming.

@Matt; one of my email addresses has been picked up by spammers and receives 50+ spam messages every day. It's the same tired litany of subjects over and over again - suv, insurance, retirement homes, walk in bath tubs, garage floor coverings, barbecues, shaving kits, investment opportunities - and it seems to totally flummox our Junk Controls. You'd think such consistency would be easy to identify but I suppose the text has enough words that are ordinarily innocent. This is in an account that has no provider-operated spam filtering.

I added junquilla earlier in this process, but it doesn't seem to do anything. It is listed under extensions in the add-ons manager, and enabled, but I don't see anything different. It is supposed to add a column giving a numeric value to a message, but I don't see any extra column...

Thanks for the explanation, anyway. A lot of my junk messages *are* from consistent addresses, in fact. It seems that the program used to detect them, once I had marked one as junk. It's only been since the last couple of upgrades that they started appearing in my inbox again. I have set up a filter of my own, but it is rather laborious having to manually add each one. That is what I thought the built-in process was doing.

Then there are the masses which are like you mention in your last paragraph...

SO I have had to install the add-on... Junquilla that is

To start with. Right click the heading at the top of your mail list. Select the heading junk %.

Now go to the options in The add-on On the toolbar then  and select options beside the entry. Click ADD it add the uncertain folders

Then read the instructions here http://mesquilla.com/extensions/junquilla/

I do suggest reading the instructions before you change the maximum token count and junk threshold. settings

Thanks for the help! I tried to mark your message as helpful, but "there was an error recording my vote". I'm wading through that stuff now...

It can be heavy going. But the uncertain folder is perhaps the best feature.

So you have a spam folder and a "i think this might be spam" folder. it allows the changes to the other to options to be fine tuned.

The new columns keep going away... I have it displaying the junk % and the junk status, but after a while, they stop displaying. I have restarted the program without losing them, so it isn't *that*, but they were there yesterday and gone just a few minutes ago...

We often see that complaint from folk using ccleaner. It deletes the setting file. See http://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/thunderbird-and-ccleaner-or-my-settings.html

Thank you! I knew that ccleaner had been installed by a tech during a remote session, but had no idea it was set to autorun...