Try this: - click to settings>general and change the display of addresses to 'email only'. I think that will address your intent.

Thank you very much David. Now if I can just stop all this junk from showing up, but that's not going to happen. There's too much money being made selling email addresses to third parties.

i was glad to assist. I personally use the free copy of Mailwasher (it's free for one email account) and it does an excellent job of remember all the email addresses I don't like. Most junk arrives overnight, so I run mailwasher first thing in the morning to clear the junk out. You might also check to see if your email provider uses Spamassasin, as thunderbird can use that to further trash the junk. And, I don't know if it's true, but I've read that unsubscribing just makes it worse. But it's hard to verify such advice. Good luck.

I would say that "Unsubscribe" in general only really works for legitimate business senders, who probably wouldn't be spamming you with lots of junk email. Most of them (not all!) are smart enough to stay on the right side of the line between advertising and annoying their customers.

If you closely examine the headers and embedded links in an email, you can usually judge whether the sender is legit or not. But if you're not sure and you don't want to spend the time and effort, I recommend you NEVER use the UNSUBSCRIBE feature. If it's a spammer, it will not stop the spam and it will just tell them that they now have a valuable valid email address that they can sell to others.

I find that junk email goes in cycles. For a while I'll get a ton of it, then it ramps down, stays quiet for a while, then cycles up again. I imagine overseas spam farms whose customers buy limited time campaigns. The campaigns are often for seemingly different "products" but are similar in format and tone. Despite some complaints I see here, Thunderbird's Bayesian spam filter does a decent job of catching most of them, and more is caught by my custom filters. So, it never goes away, but I can keep it manageable.