I have to love your ambition. Have you considered offering your ideas for the future in the appropriate place? https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas

What you are asking for is a human associate, or perhaps an AI.

If not proceeded by a known sender? You can use you address book to filter mail That is the only way anything can begin to know what is a legitimate known sender.

Have you considered using the existing delete settings for account to have deleted mail removed immediately without moving to the trash. Personally I shudder to think of the mess I could create without the option to recover my mistakes. But it does meet your requirement of not having mail in the trash. You could also just set Thunderbird to empty the folder on exist. After all it is garbage and no one really needs to keep their garbage around for any length of time.

Something I am seeing more and more of is folk wanting a bespoke assistant to manage their digital affairs that understands how they personally think and can anticipate what they might or might not want to see. My wife does a pretty good job of that, but she is probably the only one that knows me well enough. Thunderbird certainly does not have a personal assistant. Perhaps you should suggest it.

I think you have misunderstood my problem/position/request. Rather thoroughly.

BECAUSE TB makes mistakes, and a deleted mistake CANNOT be recovered, is precisely why I don't allow TB's automatic filtering to delete *anything*.

But I have my own list. And if you (not you personally, but I'm sure you understand what I mean) are on it, I don't, without any exception, want to see or recover your mail. Particularly, I don't want to see it in Trash, as one of so many potential spam messages (maybe 100 at a time) that the volume requires me to painstakingly go through the entire list to see if a mistake has been made.

If TB would filter MY list first, and DELETE anything in that list, immediately, those deletions would NEVER have mistakes. Because they would be on my KNOWN spam list. But it does not. It puts them in Trash, with, on rare occasion, a mistake.

I want TB to filter MY LIST as mail arrives, and delete ONLY what I specify. But DELETE those, not move them to trash. My filter would catch about 95%+ of all the spam. It would not make mistakes. So instead of having to sort through, say, 100 mails in the Trash to look for TB mistakes, I would have to sort through maybe 5. Clearly, this would be an enormous improvement.

No, I'm not, of course, going to let TB delete anything based on it's OWN rules. But on MY rules, I want deletion to occur.

I don't want to SEE those mails that I specify.

The real problem here is that I've apparently gotten my email address on a lot of "lists". So I routinely get the same spam from the same places, but in high volume. (Changing my email is not a good option at all.)

But I can (and actually have made) filter those repeat messages. I just can't get TB to get them out of the way as they come in, which should not be a problem. Remember, these are MY rules, not TB's "learning function". These are KNOWN, and known-to-be, 100% garbage.

And I don't want to sort through them to ensure that a rare TB auto-filtering mistake has occurred. There are emails I know, from NAMES (the spammers have defeated address filtering for the most part via random character generation that precedes a valid domain that one DARE NOT list). If that NAME is in the From, it's garbage. I don't want to see it. Not ever. There should be an incoming filter that deletes those.

The other suggestion, was probably unnecessary. But I will eventually have to leave TB if I cannot get SPECIFIC deletion (according to MY rules, and NEVER delete according to TB's adaptive system—because as we know, the adaptive system makes mistakes). I'm willing to live with MY mistakes (doubt if there would be any, if TB deleted ONLY according to my rules, but if there was one, somehow, I'd could live with it).

You can't always get what you want. One click? Not that I know of. But three clicks, yes.

- Use your infallible filter rule to first tag the messages it catches with a custom tag; then delete them. The filter will execute every time Thunderbird gets New Mail.

- Create a separate rule that will Delete only messages with your custom tag. This rule can be manually run (Tools | Run Filters on Folder) against the Trash folder as often as you wish. This will forever delete them from this universe but leave all other messages in Trash;

1. One click to select the Trash folder;

2. One click to choose menu item Tools;

3. One click to choose Run Filters on Folder

or key combination Alt - T - R to execute steps 2 and 3.

Bottom line is that spammers have to have a hook to entice recipients to open and/or act. That hook has to be the 'Name' that precedes the address, or the subject. But it has to be in one or the other.

They could defeat this by making everything random generated. But then there is no human-readable hook.

I filter the hooks.

I just want TB to delete ONLY what I filter, and nothing else. Its adaptive filter can fill my Trash. But I want to go first, and to delete.

You can't always get what you want. One click? Not that I know of. But three clicks, yes. - Use your infallible filter rule to first tag the messages it catches with a custom tag; then delete them. The filter will execute every time Thunderbird gets New Mail. - Create a separate rule that will Delete only messages with your custom tag. This rule can be manually run (Tools | Run Filters on Folder) against the Trash folder as often as you wish. This will forever delete them from this universe but leave all other messages in Trash; 1. One click to select the Trash folder; 2. One click to choose menu item Tools; 3. One click to choose Run Filters on Folder or key combination Alt - T - R to execute steps 2 and 3.

It's kind of what I'm doing, but without tagging. I just have to open the Trash, then open the filter, then run it.

Why can't this be automated?

If there were enough of a demand for such a feature, someone could possibly write an extension to do it. Apparently, there is little demand. I certainly have no need for it. The built-in Bayesian system catches most spam for me, and my custom filters, aided by the FiltaQuilla extension so I can use regular expressions, catch the rest. Good enough for me.