i installed thunderbird am now getting 6 to 12 spams per minute repeat per minute already in the thousands

How were you viewing your mail before?

If you check your mail through your email provider's web interface, does the spam appear in your Inbox there or only in Thunderbird?

Is the spam a wide variety of topics or is it all from one sender, like a stuck message that Thunderbird keeps downloading over and over?

I always used the yahoo site. They are all types and only on thunderbird they are not on yahoo maybe I did not get it installed right.

   thanks barry12398

Thunderbird downloads what makes it into your Inbox. My guess would be that Yahoo has some spam filtering that takes place after the messages get into the server Inbox and Thunderbird gets them before the Yahoo filter works. Go to the Yahoo site and check the Spam folder there. You might find where all these messages were going before you started using Thunderbird.

I can't explain it. How could Thunderbird retrieve messages that aren't on the server??

Can you set Thunderbird not to check for new message automatically (so it would only check when you click the icon to retrieve mail)? That's probably in the Account Settings somewhere. If you set that and watch your Inbox, does junk still come in? If so, you might have some kind of strange malware infection on your system or network.

I have never heard of anything like this eighter ran virus scans every thing seems to be ok. i was thinking uninstall and reinstall would that work?

barry12398 said

i was thinking uninstall and reinstall would that work?

That seems unlikely if you're going to hook it back up to the same account.

Did you try the manual retrieval test?

I was thinking some of them I recognized the sender this account is about 20 years old and has thousands of emails in it. All the messages come with just a time stamp no date could it be dragging up stuff from years ago?

not yet but i will

I think that it is stuff it has pull out of the account from years ago that did not get sent to the trash I found one from ten years ago I recognized I had assumed it was coming from the internet. it has stopped so that has to be it. If you have a tip to remove hundreds of files at a time I would thank you .

  I appreciate the time you have spent on this if can help let me know

There is a search feature, but corralling just the spam so you can bulk delete it seems a little tricky. I don't use Thunderbird enough to suggest a good way to attack it.

thanks for the help this had me going a while