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SpamAssassin, SpamPal, Bogofilter think good emails are spam?

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In Thunderbird, I set up junk email filtering using SpamAssassin then SpamPal then BogoFilter and all of them put good emails into my junk folder. I'll try the other two filters but how can these filters be useful if they can't determine the good from the bad?

In Thunderbird, I set up junk email filtering using SpamAssassin then SpamPal then BogoFilter and all of them put good emails into my junk folder. I'll try the other two filters but how can these filters be useful if they can't determine the good from the bad?

All Replies (7)

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And do things improve if you disable these 3rd-party tools? I'm wondering if Thunderbird itself is misbehaving.

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If I disable these 3rd party tools Thunderbird doesn't filter anything as spam. I don't know why it's putting regular emails in the Junk folder?

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Do you actually have access to all of these services? Few of us do. All of these rely on an upstream filter service that inserts hesders into messages indicating their spamminess. Activating the appropriate switch in Thunderbird simply sets it to respond to such headers.

Perhaps you need to reset your training data and start over, if Thunderbird is making poor choices.

Now if those headers are absent then activating this feature should have no effect. You may have found a bug in Thunderbird.

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Well, it's a brand new machine and I just installed Thunderbird so I the training data must already be reset since it's starting from scratch.

I don't have access to these services since I thought they were built into Thunderbird somehow, at least remotely.

Regardless, there must be a bug in Thunderbird since it does think lots of my good email are spam (junk) and simply turning on one of the filters shouldn't make it do this.

Anyway, thanks for you're help.

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All the spam tools you mention do not interract with Thunderbird junk mail processing. They are standalone systems that you must tweak outside Thunderbird. Please read their help sites.

Put another way, if you have enabled "Trust junk mail headers set by ..." then that is not part of nor affected by Thunderbird's junk training.

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Okay, then there must be a bug in Thunderbird because setting that checkbox shouldn't make Thunderbird think a majority of my good emails are junk. Thanks for the info.

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If this is a new Thunderbird, have you enabled and set up the Junk Controls ? Have you actually been training Thunderbird to recognise what is AND what is not Junk ? Have you selected your address books to be a whitelist ?

Thunderbird has no knowledge of what is or not junk until you start to train it. So in the beginning, anything could end up in Junk especially if you have not set up the controls nor selected address books as whitelists.

In case it may have started on the wrong foot. Check all the aspects of Junk Controls. Then Reset Training Data. Work through emails in the Junk folder selecting 'Not Junk' where appropriate. All information is at this link.

images below to assist.