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To Thunderbird STAFF/DEVELOPERS: Suggestions of improvements to tackle spam

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  • Last reply by Matt

FlatCat
FlatCat
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I am being peltered by aggressive (and threatening) spam. It is very uncomfortable, although I know the spammers don't have access to what they claim they have. I want to make these stop once and for all. There are some issues with the Thunderbird spam detecting device:

1. there is little use of the feature to white list adressbooks since spammers know how to easily fake the emails as coming from my own email adress. Aka, if I whitelist myself I whitelist the spammer, if I blacklist the spammer, I blacklist myself. Also, it took me some time (too much time!) to manage to find where to switch off the Thunderbird default set up to put everyone who I (allegedly! - spammers use this!) sent an email to. Why would I want to have some random person in my adressbook, whom I only need to communicate with once? At least, this feature shouldn't be set up as default. By this default the aggressive spammer made himself stuck in my adressbook so sailed past any spam-fighting thing I tried!

2. it's counterproductive having an option in the preference setting under "spam", to mark all as "read". It's exactly what the spammer needs to know to get the signal the email adress is monitored and used! If you didn't know, this is fully possible: i work with (legal and consented) email lists, and the software used for this tells me who opened their emails and who didn't.

2 b. 95% of spam emails you can detect by just looking at the sender/subject as they come in listed. It would be helpful is they could be ticked (as in for instance yahoo email) in a box next to every line, which marks them without actually opening them, and then be able to delete, or junk mail mark totally untouched. As is, Thuderbird opens the email as soon as I touch the line, even when I "spam" mark them - thus sending that useful signal to the spammer that the email has been opened.

3. It would be helpful if there is a separate setting for "delete" - via the general setting I can chose that emails are deleted instantly or moved to trash folder (and from there I have to delete them again manually). This is of course fine for legitimate emails, but the once that are spam for sure, I would like to have deleted without passing "trash". It would therefore be helpful if this option is given in the pref/junk settings separately.

4. There seems to be an odd issue with the filters. I can set a filter with the exact wording of say subject or sender, and the filter will detect it and move the message to "trash". However, since I don't want it saved in the trash either, but completely deleted, I run the filter on trash folder as well, but then it doesn't work any longer (?), but I had to set up a new filter - very time consuming. Here again, it would be helpful if there was a choice within the filter settings to delete those filtered emails entirely instantly, or move to "trash" - as in letting us make the choice manually, for those ones when it is more effective to override the automised functions.

All the best

I am being peltered by aggressive (and threatening) spam. It is very uncomfortable, although I know the spammers don't have access to what they claim they have. I want to make these stop once and for all. There are some issues with the Thunderbird spam detecting device: 1. there is little use of the feature to white list adressbooks since spammers know how to easily fake the emails as coming from my own email adress. Aka, if I whitelist myself I whitelist the spammer, if I blacklist the spammer, I blacklist myself. Also, it took me some time (too much time!) to manage to find where to switch off the Thunderbird default set up to put everyone who I (allegedly! - spammers use this!) sent an email to. Why would I want to have some random person in my adressbook, whom I only need to communicate with once? At least, this feature shouldn't be set up as default. By this default the aggressive spammer made himself stuck in my adressbook so sailed past any spam-fighting thing I tried! 2. it's counterproductive having an option in the preference setting under "spam", to mark all as "read". It's exactly what the spammer needs to know to get the signal the email adress is monitored and used! If you didn't know, this is fully possible: i work with (legal and consented) email lists, and the software used for this tells me who opened their emails and who didn't. 2 b. 95% of spam emails you can detect by just looking at the sender/subject as they come in listed. It would be helpful is they could be ticked (as in for instance yahoo email) in a box next to every line, which marks them without actually opening them, and then be able to delete, or junk mail mark totally untouched. As is, Thuderbird opens the email as soon as I touch the line, even when I "spam" mark them - thus sending that useful signal to the spammer that the email has been opened. 3. It would be helpful if there is a separate setting for "delete" - via the general setting I can chose that emails are deleted instantly or moved to trash folder (and from there I have to delete them again manually). This is of course fine for legitimate emails, but the once that are spam for sure, I would like to have deleted without passing "trash". It would therefore be helpful if this option is given in the pref/junk settings separately. 4. There seems to be an odd issue with the filters. I can set a filter with the exact wording of say subject or sender, and the filter will detect it and move the message to "trash". However, since I don't want it saved in the trash either, but completely deleted, I run the filter on trash folder as well, but then it doesn't work any longer (?), but I had to set up a new filter - very time consuming. Here again, it would be helpful if there was a choice within the filter settings to delete those filtered emails entirely instantly, or move to "trash" - as in letting us make the choice manually, for those ones when it is more effective to override the automised functions. All the best

Modified by Matt

All Replies (1)

Matt
Matt
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1. Thunderbird spam detection does not use the from or really the to address for the reasons you list. You will note that there is a personal address book and a collected address book. Setting for "whitelisting" are per address book. You can also create many many more address books that meet your needs. Collecting outgoing addresses is for most people a useful feature.

2. Utter rubbish. unless you have enabled remote images there is not way for a spammer to even know you read the message. This is the sort of urban legend that leaves a lot of people doing a lots of things to "defeat spam" that achieve nothing but keeping them busy. Yahoo as a select box because of the limitation on selecting HTML list. It has nothing to do with your convenience, but they have trained folk to think it is.

3. I suggest you use the automatic delete in the SPAM setting for your account. Perhaps after 1 day.

4. I suggest you use your server settings to delete mail on exit and you will have a nice clean trash folder with no need to use filters to do what they are not intended to do.