Why is the junk mail filter so useless?
I turned off junk mail filtering and am glad I did. I don't get that much junk, and so I just mark it all in the inbox. What I don't have to do now is restore all the messages from a couple of listserves I'm on that Thunderbird insists on moving to junk - not every mail from these listerves, just some. There is nothing weird in the subject, I have the addresses in my address book, I'm constantly marking them as not junk, and it still insists on sending them to junk - sometimes.
But why doesn't it work properly? Why is it so wrong so much of the time?
All Replies (5)
I forgot to mention I had the adaptive filter turned on, too.
I also forgot to mention that not only did it move what it should have known were good messages to junk regularly, sometimes it would not mark a message as junk that was so obviously junk. You know, things like: "We need your payment details for this invoice", or whatever. Just ridiculously obvious.
So now instead of having to mark my good messages as good, and yet still occasionally mark junk as junk in the inbox, I just go through the inbox marking junk as junk. Done. Why can't Thunderbird do that?
Sorry, I keep remembering how this DIDN'T work. It wouldn't mark messages as junk, but would MOVE THEM TO JUNK ANYWAY. So I would always have a bunch of messages from my listserves in junk, not marked as junk, which I would then click twice, once to mark as junk and then again to mark as not junk so it move back to inbox and be sent to the proper subfolder according to my rules.
Life is easier without the junk mail filter.
You won't get a fight from me; the junk filter requires work to be successful and I never give it the adequate time. But that's because I receive few spam. Without training, the junk filter never learns but keeps repeating mistakes. My suggestion, if you want to get the filter meeting your needs is to periodically mark junk and non-junk. If your email provider offers a tool on web, see it is is one that Thunderbird works with and make that setting as well. With ongoing feedback to the filter, it does improve :) This URL may help:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages
IDK, David, thanks for replying, but like so many replies from top 10 contributors (in all sorts of forums) the reply has little to do with the original issue presented in the original post. If you had read my posts you would have been able to surmise that I HAVE WORKED MY ASS OFF marking, unmarking, making sure addresses are in my personal address book. I should make sure Thunderbird works with my email provider? That's xfinity. Is there a chance the Thunderbird doesn't know about xfinity? If so, then Thunderbird comes from another universe and I should dump it because I live in this universe.
I'm sorry, but, frankly, it's insulting to assume that I am an idiot wandering in the weeds and never thought about your facile suggestions. You must be a top 10 contributor just because you make these facile suggestions without reading the original post, and so you have time to make a LOT of contributions, even if few of them actually help anyone. This comment is not meant to be insulting but is just my interpretation of the facts I see in front of me.
You obviously didn't post here for suggestions; you only wanted to vent about the junk filter. I should have recognized that from the wording in your post topic. Since you feel the junk filter is useless (despite it being successful with many others), I presume you are seeking other solutions.