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Thunderbird blacklist doesn't seem to be working

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  • Last reply by Don Peters

Don Peters
Don Peters
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Thunderbird normally does a great job of filtering out spam, but over the past few months I've been getting some spam messages in my inbox. They are all from the same source. So, to combat this, I set up the source in Thunderbird's "blacklist".

I set up my blacklist message rule to filter the "from", and "contains", and the target to: 

  .onmicrosoft.com

Yet I still keep getting these spam e-mails from a source whose "from" contains ".onmicrosoft.com". That doesn't make any sense to me... unless the Thunderbird blacklist feature doesn't work.

As an extra check, I clicked one of those spam messages, them "more", then "view source" to verify that the "from" was indeed ".onmicrosoft.com", and it was. So, what's going on here?

Thunderbird normally does a great job of filtering out spam, but over the past few months I've been getting some spam messages in my inbox. They are all from the same source. So, to combat this, I set up the source in Thunderbird's "blacklist". I set up my blacklist message rule to filter the "from", and "contains", and the target to: .onmicrosoft.com Yet I still keep getting these spam e-mails from a source whose "from" contains ".onmicrosoft.com". That doesn't make any sense to me... unless the Thunderbird blacklist feature doesn't work. As an extra check, I clicked one of those spam messages, them "more", then "view source" to verify that the "from" was indeed ".onmicrosoft.com", and it was. So, what's going on here?

All Replies (2)

Matt
Matt
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is the filter actually set to run on the account getting the mail? It defaults, if memory serves, to the "local Folders" account.

Don Peters
Don Peters Question owner
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Thanks for the reply Matt. Yes, as far as I know the filter is set to the account. Regarding "local folders", I don't understand that comment, i.e., a message arrives at my inbox and is then filtered. After the filtering process, if I then see it, I can move it to a local folder, and as far as I know, no filtering takes place when I do this move.

BUT... I may have found the problem. Upon closer examination, I see that the whitelist filtering runs before the blacklist filtering, and in my whitelist filtering I have the entry "microsoft.com". Since that's a substring of "onmicrosoft.com", it will pass the white filter test, and never get to the blacklist check. My fix, which I'm testing now, is to change the white filter "microsoft.com" to ".microsoft.com". If that works, the error was on my part in both not realizing the whitelist filtering took place first AND that I had a too simple whitelist filter called simply "microsoft.com". My guess is that scammers might have anticipated this might happen to some!