Mail filtering in Thunderbird 1.5 [LWN.net]

Mail filtering in Thunderbird 1.5

Posted Oct 13, 2005 3:39 UTC (Thu) by djfoobarmatt (subscriber, #6446)
Parent article: Mail filtering in Thunderbird 1.5

If the spam filter in Thunderbird 1 makes a mistake, you can click on a 'not junk' button when you select the false positive (which might have been moved to the junk folder) or click on the trashcan next to the item in the listing and then drag it back to the inbox. It would be nice if the 'not junk' button also moved the email back to the inbox. Sounds like 1.5 hasn't got that. I agree that it learns faster than SpamAssasin which seems to be because SpamAssasin uses the Bayesian filter as just one of it's criteria for rejecting spam (as well as black lists and all sorts of other configurations) where as Thunderbird seems to just use the Bayesian filter alone.

Also, Thunderbird 1 can whitelist an addressbook which reduces false positives too. I assume 1.5 still has this.

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Mail filtering in Thunderbird 1.5

Posted Oct 13, 2005 9:36 UTC (Thu) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link]

I have all my spam re-directed to the junk folder, but when I have time I tend to check through for false positives: these do happen occasionally. Of course, that might be to do with the fact that my ISP is quite aggressive about flagging up potential spam by altering the subject line.

Mail filtering with SpamAssassin

Posted Oct 13, 2005 13:14 UTC (Thu) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I find that using SpamAssassin + procmail is good, because spam determination is not "yes/no". I refile things that are definately spam (lots of SpamAssassin points) into a "junk" folder, and things that are probably spam (a few SpamAssassin points) into a "junk-check" folder. I look at the contents of "junk-check" every week or so.

In the past 2 years or so, I have had something like 2 false positives in the "junk-check", and none in the "junk".

This system saved a lot of time I was wasting looking at spam.