junk mail controls question

cmcgoat · Post by **cmcgoat** » June 15th, 2003, 9:26 am

When I mark an email as junk does thunderbird actually
'learn' to identify this kind of message as junk?

I'm using an application called popfile (which is great!)
which uses statistics to learn which messages are spam
and which aren't, but I'm not sure what mozilla does
once a message is marked as junk.

jhirshon · Post by **jhirshon** » June 15th, 2003, 10:33 am

I've actually wondered the same thing - if Tbird doesn't learn by bayesian filtering, I'd love to get a copy of the program you mentioned - where can it be downloaded?

cheers, JH

cmcgoat · Post by **cmcgoat** » June 15th, 2003, 11:01 am

You can get it here:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net

mscott · Post by **mscott** » June 15th, 2003, 11:34 am

Mozilla & thunderbird use a bayesian technique for determining if a message is junk or not. (In other words it is a statisics driven algorith just like pop file.

jhirshon · Post by **jhirshon** » June 15th, 2003, 11:54 am

mscott wrote:Mozilla & thunderbird use a bayesian technique for determining if a message is junk or not. (In other words it is a statisics driven algorith just like pop file.

Cool - many thanks, Scott

Looking forward to seeing the new build!

cheers, JH

rakhesh · Post by **rakhesh** » June 16th, 2003, 1:23 am

The latest <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html">mozilla roadmap</a> notes that "... we've seen the emergence of great features such as tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and http://paulgraham.com-inspired <b>Bayesian</b> spam filtering, ...". And checking paulgraham.com gives us two spam filtering techniques -- http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html. I guess one of these is what mozilla uses.

-- Rakhesh

Amerk_5 · Post by **Amerk_5** » June 16th, 2003, 8:10 am

From what I've read on the forums here, to train the controls, after you mark a message as junk you have to keep marking junk emails with the junk mail icon & going to Tools > Run Junk Mail Controls on Folder until the Junk mail icon stays on the message. And if you get a message that it believes is junk but isn't, you just do the opposite of before, you keep removing the the junk mail icon & running Junk Mail Controls on Folder until the junk mail icon doesn't stay on the email.

WildCelt · Post by **WildCelt** » June 16th, 2003, 9:19 am

I must say it works very well. It catches all junkmail I have received thus far, and has mislabled only a few messages as junk (when they were legit).