
Thunderbird ignores the "Not Junk" manual tagging
I love Thunderbird, I think it is an excellent product all round, but one thing that really, really niggles me is that it continually marks certain senders as junk.
I receive Emails from these senders all the time, and often miss Emails because Thunderbird has marked them as junk, and moved them to the Junk folder, which means I don't see them on my mobile devices (IMAP).
I've marked this sender as "Not Junk" at least a thousand times. Each time it accepts my tag, and moves the Email back to the Inbox. However, that doesn't last, as the next Email, or the one after, or the one after that, ends up in Junk again.
I've seen a few posts that protest - this is not Thunderbird's fault, it's your Email provider, but I've already crossed that one off the list as I have white listed the entire domain at the Email provider. So nothing is getting flagged from the Email provider, to hint that it might be junk.
I'm always on the latest version of Thunderbird, and I have adaptive junk filter logging enabled, but it is completely empty of any logs. I also have "Do not automatically mark mail as junk if the sender is in "collected addresses" & "personal address book". I have a number of entries from this domain in the personal address book, as well as *.@domain-name.com, though I'm not sure if that format is correct to capture the entire domain.
Any help on this matter, gratefully received.
M
All Replies (8)
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages#w_whitelisting
Perhaps read about whitelisting using you address book. It is the only time Thunderbird will have any regard to the from line in an email in determining if the message is junk. You can mark the message based on the from line forever, if the message looks like spam the filter will mark it as spam. You marking the message as not spam based solely on sender is probably having the exactly reverse result, it is making the filter think spammy email text is good because you keep telling it that is so. This is especially so with politically motivated messages in the USA and marketing emails as both appear to be more interested in tracking the reader and their actions/forwards etc than in informing them of anything.
So what is the email provider and how do you "whitelist the whole domain" I have no idea what this is ".@domain-name.com" you can put it in your address book, but it is not an email address so you will never get a message from it for the whitelisting code to act against it.
None of the mass free email providers Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail et. al. actually offer an option to opt out of their spam filtering. Yahoo for instance will reach into any folder you have placed mail in and move it to spam, even after you mark it as not spam and place it where you want it. They require the email address to be in their address book for it to be whitelisted and again they all rely on a per address whitelist, not some domain whitelisting process. SO if Bill@example.com is in your address book, it will be whitelisted. Billy@example.com will not and @example.com will never send you mail for it to match against. The sending server will reject the email for having a bad sender format, long before it ever gets sent anywhere.
Any other circumstance, especially that which you describe is an action take by your mail provider, or your antivirus product of choice. There are at least three spam filters in play with most folks email using IMAP on a windows PC. If the security package purports to protect against Scams or Spam it is more than capable of royally screwing it up. So lets start from basics as I asked earlier.
I would say with a great deal of confidence that if your junk log is empty you are looking at the wrong product for the filtering that is driving you crazy. My log has mail from as early as 2010 and as late as the 26 May this year It has not filtered anything to junk in the past weeks.
My spam folder on one gmail account has 69 email since the 26th May that have been placed there by google/Gmail. That does not include all accounts, just the one that gets messages from this forum. None of those message as they appear in the SPAM folder has the Red spam flag set in the list, because Thunderbird did not identify the messages as spam. Do your messages have the spam flag set and showing red, or is the flag greyed out like mine?
M said
I've seen a few posts that protest - this is not Thunderbird's fault, it's your Email provider, but I've already crossed that one off the list as I have white listed the entire domain at the Email provider. So nothing is getting flagged from the Email provider, to hint that it might be junk.
That is a level of confidence I simply do not share. Who is the provider? How did you implement this domain whitelist with them? What antivirus product do you use?
I have the same problem. Every day I get a summary email of news from the New York Times. For a long time it was working fine. But a few months ago, Thunderbird started saying "this message looks like junk mail". I have clicked "Not Junk" a hundred times to no avail. I have added the NYT sending email address to my Address Book. I've even looked at the detailed header info on the email to see if there are any triggers or other email addresses I could look for, but have found nothing. It's not actually a huge issue for me, but annoying.
Here is the address that the mail is coming from: nytdirect@nytimes.com
After I read the NYT mail, I do delete it to keep my inbox reasonably sized, but supposedly that doesn't have anything to do with Junk identification.
The detailed header includes a line "List-ID <nyt.1.3.sparkpostmail.com>" but this does not have an @ sign, so Thunderbird doesn't think it's a valid email address.
This NYT email is arriving at a Gmail address that I have, and it's handled as an IMAP mail server. If I log on to Gmail directly, there's no indication that Google is suspicious of the NYT mail.
I have a free subscription to New York Times headlines email. It comes to a gmail account. Thunderbird keeps indicating "Thunderbird thinks this message is junk" and putting an orange flame on the message. I've clicked "Not Junk" hundreds of times, but Thunderbird never learns. I've tried to whitelist the account by putting the email address (nytdirect@nytimes.com) in my Addresses folder, but that does not help either.
It's not a fatal problem, but very annoying.
@Matt, thank you for your reply, which I have read carefully.
I'm always grateful for any responses that try to help with a problem, but I do have to take issue with some of your remarks.
I always do my own research and try to find my own answers before posting and wasting people's time on silly problems that are easy to solve with a few minutes online. The link you sent had very basic information about SPAM filtering, nothing new, but I did find the following paragraphs:
"Whitelisting
Under Do not automatically mark mail as junk if the sender is in you can select address books which will be used as a whitelist. Senders whose email address is in a whitelisted address book are exempt and will not be automatically marked as junk by Thunderbird. But you can still manually marking a message containing a whitelisted address as junk.
It is recommended that you enable whitelisting to help ensure that messages from people you most care about will not be marked as junk."
I specifically focussed in on the statement "Senders whose email address is in a whitelisted address book are exempt and will not be automatically marked as junk by Thunderbird". This is all I want Thunderbird to do!
I could not find any evidence to support your quote "You marking the message as not spam based solely on sender is probably having the exactly reverse result".
Marking the messages as Not SPAM, is exactly what you ARE supposed to do.
So, moving forward to my Email provider, and as stated already, I have taken the prescribed steps to white list the whole domain. In which case, my Email provider is simply allowing the Email to pass through un-marked.
We do not use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, or any other free bulk provider, we use a professional business Email service. So if their configuration says that the Email is white listed, I believe it. In any case, no matter how my Email provider marks the Email (as long as it doesn't move it), according to the statement above, if the address is in my address book, it should not touch the Email and allow it to be delivered to my inbox.
All Email junk filters that I've ever come across in business, have white and black lists, for good reason. Within those lists, you can list individual addresses, or if it is more practical, you can list an entire domain, via various different methods. I don't know what syntax Thunderbird operates, or even if it does adopt this feature, but if you understand this topic at all, you must understand that concept, and what I was trying to indicate with @domain-name.com.
If this statement is true "I would say with a great deal of confidence that if your junk log is empty you are looking at the wrong product for the filtering", then according to that, Thunderbird has never ever done any SPAM filtering since the day it was installed. I find that hard to accept. I would rather more think that the log isn't working.
You seem to be basing your assessment of my situation around me using some bulk Email provider such as Gmail, which just isn't the case, and as the domain in question is clearly white listed at my provider - a system that is proven to be effective, particularly with their black list, which I use a lot, as Thunderbird seems to let in quite a lot of obvious spoofing, I still feel the issue is with Thunderbird moving the Email.
I'm going to switch Thunderbird off for a week or two and if what you say is true, the Emails will still get moved to junk. If they don't, it must be Thunderbird at fault.
It does seem to me that there is a fair bit of contraversy around the Thunderbird junk filter, and how it actually operates.
M
@jay46,
You make an interesting point there, you delete the Email once you've read it. My Emails are similar, in that they are quite transactional, and I don't keep them. Once I've dealt with it, I delete it.
It really shouldn't be that Thunderbird is learning from deleted Email, where people are just trying to keep their Email inboxes in a clean state, but it's a thought for sure that these two cases might indicaate.
I agree with you that it's not a critical issue, but quite annoying and I would just like Thunderbird to do what it says on the tin!
Having said that, I have missed out on situations because at times I'm only looking at the account on a mobile device and it doesn't show the Junk folder without some rooting around, and I'm not really expecting these Emails to go in there.
M
Irony of ironies, this very morning the NYT summary finally showed up without being flagged as junk! I did nothing new on my end. Did Mozilla secretly issue an update in the last 24 hours? Or did I finally tip the scales of how many "Not Junk" clicks would be needed to train their algorithm?
According to documentation I've seen, deleting emails in Thunderbird is totally acceptable and has no impact on the junk filtering algorithm.
@jay46,
One swallow does not a summer make.
See how things go. Maybe you do need 1001 clicks on Not Junk.
M
I have that problem with some emails address, too. One is from a colleague on my company, and other an email from a commercial company of we do business and send several emails, both of them go to junk/spam folder. The old emails from them are not moved to the spam folder, just the new emails. I already did a filter for do not mark as spam. I have to activate manually the filter, because it keep sending them to spam, once the filter run, they send it back to the inbox, but after some time, it return to spam. Both address are on my "personal address book".
I don´t know what else to do.
I will appreciate your feedback and support.
I really like Thunderbird, I'm using since I think 2005 or 2007, and I'm recommending it to everyone !