Can anyone suggest an addon for better spam control?
Hi there everyone,
Let me just start by saying that I have always found Thunderbird's spam capability to be abysmal. Years down the road, TB continues to get obvious and easy to rate emails wrong generating both false positives and negatives. No matter how many times I mark as spam or not-spam, years later, TB still throws a ton of my reply notifications in the junk folder and serves me nigerian scams on a platter in my inbox. The feature is so bad, it's actually a time saver for me to turn it off.
Is there an addon that replaces TB's spam system that works better or do I just need to run with no app spam control?
Thanks for your time!
All Replies (3)
These days most spam filtering happens on the server. Doesn't your email provider do this? One what slips through on the server would have to be handled by Thunderbird. There are no problems here with this. What you could try is to reset the training data, and hence kind of start from scratch. Unfortunately that means you'd have to train the filter (again).
christ1 said
What you could try is to reset the training data, and hence kind of start from scratch. Unfortunately that means you'd have to train the filter (again).
Thanks very much for the help. I've used Thunderbird since the days it was known as Minotaur. It's been my experience that TB has never "learned" how to determine a mail's spamminess reliably. For that reason, I wouldn't waste my time wiping and re-teaching TB to mark spam correctly.
I'll see if I can find any akismet or similar plugins on github, I imagine there's got to be something floating around out there in the addon world that utilizes a decent system.
As for using the systems at the server, I'm really hoping to handle it at the client, if possible.
Interesting how you are not looking on the official addon site. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/ There you will see very very little beyond tools for reporting SPAM using various commercial products.
Github may be the home source control for most of the released addons for Thunderbird, is not somewhere I would start looking for a stable and reliable addons not already listed on addons Thunderbird.net.
Personally I have used Thunderbird's spam filter exclusively for most of the last 20 years and find it about 99.9% accurate, way better that the Google or GMX ones and they stand out from the shoddy offerings of Microsoft and Yahoo/AOL.
My experience does come with some caveats.
- I do not consider solicited and unwanted email as SPAM.
- I live in jurisdiction with rather robust spam laws, so SPAM is only slight. Here in Australia it works mostly works as the fines for business that send unsolicited email are huge and prosecuted by government employees.
Fundamentally if your spam can be significantly limited using the sending address in Filtering, a complaint I hear on these forums frequently and something Thunderbird specifically does not do, it is highly unlikely that the mail is SPAM, merely unwanted correspondence.
You might want to try changing the thresholds for spam if what is occurring is not meeting your needs. It is an ability that has been around for probably most of the last 20 years, but very few do it because it has no button. use the config editor to modify the setting mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold, to a value lower than the default 90. Some folk have historically reported good results with values of 30 or lower.
References http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages