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by pdkp 5097 days ago
- The SPAM filter in Thunderbird is A.W.F.U.L. Let me repeat that A-W-F-U-L. Despite training it for years it routinely misses the same spam, with the same title, and the same content, while sometimes marking very important emails as junk.

As someone who has also been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, I have not had the same experience. If anything, same content/subject/sender email spam is where Thunderbird's spam filter shines for me.

I have two fairly heavily spammed accounts, one of which has a public email address. They consistently catch and remove same or similar content spam every day without issue.

In regards to false positives, it does happen sometimes. Although in most cases the emails that end up in the junk folder legitimately resemble a spam message. Almost any time a legitimate email has been marked as spam, which doesn't really happen all that often, unspamming it is sufficient to ensure the sender doesn't end up there again.

1 comments

I get more false positives than false negatives. But when I switched to out Outlook 2007 for half a year (got my hands on free Office 2007 launch kit) That was the first thing I noticed. Outlook, at least for me, had amazing spam control right out of the box. Everything else was dreadful but the spam control was amazing. Then again, I tend to have email addresses from almost 10 years ago when I was 15.

Maybe its because I'm using a portable version of Thunderbird. Although it shouldn't matter.

No, it's not just you. I've had an unhappy experience with the spam filters (with a normal Thunderbird install) for years now. It seems to miss things that are obviously spam (to a human); thankfully I haven't had too many false-positives... that I've caught, at least.