Junk Emails

[tsmith777]

When I mark an email as Junk, I am under the impression that if I get another email from the same person/company that email will be automatically sent to the junk file, that is not happening on my compute. Any help?

[tsor]

Have you activated the Junk Mail Controls on both ends?
Note: Controls are divided between two locations: More --> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls

[tanstaafl]

When I mark an email as Junk, I am under the impression that if I get another email from the same person/company that email will be automatically sent to the junk file

Not a good assumption. Whether another message from that sender gets classified as junk depends upon why the junk mail controls thought the original message was junk (was it due to the content or due to it being sent from a address that its gotten lots of spam from for example), and how confident it was in that opinion. That's partially dependent upon how many junk messages you got from that email address.

See the training and tweaking sections of http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls. Thunderbird needs a certain amount of known good and known bad messages to learn from. Its default settings also make it learn very slowly.

"mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold is the preference that determines at what "level" messages are classified as junk. It defaults to 90. Lowering this value will make it easier to recognize messages as spam, though it increases the risk that it will classify a legitimate message as spam."

"Bayesian filtering requires at least 100 bad messages be marked as spam and 100 good messages marked as not junk to function. To work best, it needs a few hundred of each marked"

[tanstaafl]

Its usually a bad idea to deal with spam using the message filters (you don't want to re-invent the wheel) but sometimes it makes sense to use a message filter to automatically mark messages from a certain sender/company as junk if the junk mail controls have problems learning to recognize them as spam despite your flagging a dozen of those messages as junk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning for some background on a technique that some spammers use that might cause this problem.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Message_Filters

[redcat22]

Hi,

Please can someone explain me how can I get the spam messages from outlook in thunderbird. Because I tryed everthing that I could find in the web and nothing seems to work. I need those messages, because some are not spam (in portugues in outlook this folder is called: Correio Electrónico Não Solicitado). I can get the rest of the messages but none in this folder.

I am geting the messages from:
https://outlook.office.com (office 365)
I already activated the junk folder in thunderbird but is always empty.

Get the spam messages should be a simple thing to do but prove to be a headache in thunderbird. In the last years I have been using the firefox but never try thunderbird, which seems to have very nice features. However a simple and important aspect like this is not intutitive and let people to despair after spend several hours trying to solve it without sucess.

Any help would be apreciated.

[tanstaafl]

If you are using a IMAP account you can access that folder. A IMAP account lets you use all of the webmail folders as if they were local folders on your hard disk.

If you are using a POP account some email providers have a setting in webmail (you need to use a browser to change it) to tell the POP server to also fetch mail from the junk/spam folder when it gets a request to download messages from the inbox. That is totally transparent to Thunderbird. I don't know if outlook.com supports that feature.

You can have both a POP and a IMAP account for the same mailbox/email address at the same time. I suggest you add a IMAP account (if you are using a POP account) and see if you like it. It will be strange at first because it works quite differently, but it is much more useful and avoids some of the pitfalls of a POP account such as a logjam due to problems downloading a "bad" message. I doubt Thunderbird will ever drop support for POP accounts but its a legacy feature nowadays.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP

[redcat22]

Hi tanstaafl,

Thanks. I am using an IMAP account. But can you elaborate about how to retrieve the spam folder Because i am still unable to get those messages?

[tanstaafl]

Right click on the outlook account name in the folder pane and select "subscribe" from the popup window. You should see a subscribe window. Check the checkbox next to junk, press the subscribe button and then the OK button. That should add the junk folder. Alternatively go to tools -> account settings -> outlook-> server settings -> advanced and UNcheck "show only subscribed folders"

You can configure the junk settings to use that junk folder. I have a Outlook account, not a Office 365 account. I don't know if Office 365 uses a different junk/spam folder or not but that should be easy for you to deal with.

Only showing subscribed folders is a way to manage visual clutter in the folder pane.

[redcat22]

Thank you very much, at least solved.

I spend hours trying to solve this problem. Dont make any sense to be so dificult to get this data. This should be improved in other versions...