Get Better Spam Filtering With Thunderbird
By default Thunderbird doesn’t help to filter out spam and instead relies on whatever spam protection your email provider uses. This can be frustrating, not to mention create security problems, since rather than block legitimate messages, your provider takes the risk and you end up with a bit more spam.
I see users delete spam messages using Outlook, Thunderbird, and the varieties of webmail. Simply deleting a spam email doesn’t help you in the long run – because unless someone (you, your email client, someone!) knows a message is spam it will wind up in your inbox.
It’s easy to enable Thunderbird’s adaptive junk mail for one or all of your accounts.
- From the tool bar click Tools > Account Settings
- Scroll down and select Junk Settings > Enable Adaptive Junk Mail Controls…
- Select below, 14 days or some other interval for Thunderbird to automatically delete the messages in your spam folder. Just make sure to check your spam folder to catch any valid emails that may have been incorrectly marked.
- Click Ok
Now, every time you get an email that is spam, click Thunderbird’s junk button shown on the right. Thunderbird will then slowly begin to learn which messages are spam based on what you teach it. The concept is the same with other email clients and will gradually reduce the amount of spam you receive and the time you take to delete messages every day. Less spam will also protect you and other users in case they’ve forgotten the lessons they’ve learned from Anti-Phishing Phil.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Oh, and unless it was a message that you signed up for (by making a purchase, signing up on a website, or other prior transaction) you should generally never click any “unsubscribe” links, or send emails back. To the professional spammers, that just proves that someone does read the messages. Therefore they add your address to their “confirmed” address list, and your email address just became more valuable to them (and less valuable to you).