Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

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jeffryfisher
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Joined: March 31st, 2013, 4:45 pm

Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by jeffryfisher »

Ditto since same upgrade, nearly every message is flagged as soon as I preview it. Some of the same messages I unflagged yesterday were flagged again today.

Amazingly, one new message passed -- and it was the one phishing scam of the bunch. While that may seem comically ironic, it may point to a real bug, like a minus sign missing or logical expression being inverted so that good mail is flagged while actual junk is not.

Meanwhile, the original question hasn't even been addressed: How can I completely disable the junk feature? I don't need it and I don't want it. I want to pull the plug on spam detection, remove the flame column and use Thunderbird without it.

Thanks,
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tanstaafl
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Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by tanstaafl »

Is "enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account" unchecked in the accounts junk mail settings?

Is "trust junk mail headers set by ..." unchecked?

Is "tell me if the message I'm reading is a suspected scam" in the privacy&security section unchecked?

Unchecking those three settings should disable flagging a message as junk unless you have a add-on or message filter that's setting the junk status.

Does this problem occur in more than one account? Are you using a POP or IMAP account? Who is your email provider? In a few cases similar problems have been caused by a bug in the IMAP server (such as the one used by Spectrum).

Any indications that your email provider is the one deciding its junk, not Thunderbird, such as adding a prefix to the subject?

Try right clicking on the folder in the folder pane, selecting properties and pressing the repair folder button. That will rebuild the folder listing, but doesn't fix a corrupted folder.

Any chance your inbox is corrupted? The automated compacting due to "compact all folders when it will save over 'X' MB space in total" frequently doesn't compact a inbox very often. The combination of lots of messages and deleted but hidden from view messages (such as when a message is either deleted or moved) increases the chances of corruption. A good rule of thumb is to try to keep less than 1000 messages in the inbox, and move any others you want to keep to other folders/child folders.

You can left click on the small weird looking column header in the folder listing at the far right (just above the vertical scrollbar) to pop up a list box with checkboxes for what columns you want to display in the folder. Uncheck "junk status" and click on the "apply columns to" to manage what folders/accounts have that setting.

What version are you using? There have been a lot of 78.* upgrades. The current version is 78.8.1.
mauromol
Posts: 12
Joined: March 25th, 2008, 2:43 am

Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by mauromol »

These are the replies for my case:
tanstaafl wrote:Is "enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account" unchecked in the accounts junk mail settings?
It's checked.
tanstaafl wrote:Is "trust junk mail headers set by ..." unchecked?
It's unchecked.
tanstaafl wrote:Is "tell me if the message I'm reading is a suspected scam" in the privacy&security section unchecked?
It's checked, but this is another subject completely.
tanstaafl wrote:Does this problem occur in more than one account? Are you using a POP or IMAP account? Who is your email provider? In a few cases similar problems have been caused by a bug in the IMAP server (such as the one used by Spectrum).
I can't state for sure. Just made some tests and it seems to occur only on one account. I only use IMAP accounts. My mail provider where it happens is tiscali.it. However, I never had such problems until I upgraded.
Also, what is completely unexpected is that mails are not marked as junk on mail check (if so, they should be immediately flagged and moved to the SPAM folder, because this is what is currently configured for that account and this indeed happens for some mails), but rather on mail click. Also, mails marked as junk in this way are not moved to the SPAM folder.
tanstaafl wrote:Any indications that your email provider is the one deciding its junk, not Thunderbird, such as adding a prefix to the subject?
No prefix on subject. There are some SPAM-related headers in the mail, but the above option to trust mail headers is unchecked for me.

Also, these are the headers of one of the mails that was marked as SPAM on click:
X-Spam-Final-Verdict: clean
X-Spam-State: 0
X-Spam-Score: 50
X-Spam-Verdict: clean
If I understand these right, they should say that it was detected as not SPAM, so in case Thunderbird is doing exactly the opposite. I would rather say Thunderbird is just ignoring these headers.
tanstaafl wrote:Try right clicking on the folder in the folder pane, selecting properties and pressing the repair folder button. That will rebuild the folder listing, but doesn't fix a corrupted folder.
Tried to do it right now, I'm a bit skeptical, but I will see if it solves the problem.
tanstaafl wrote:What version are you using? There have been a lot of 78.* upgrades. The current version is 78.8.1.
I'm using Thunderbird 78.7.1, the latest available for Ubuntu 20.04.
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tanstaafl
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Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by tanstaafl »

I didn't expect "repair folder" to help either but there was a remote possibility your folder listing was corrupted and it is quick to try.

Sounds like your email provider correctly decided they were not spam, but Thunderbird thought everything was spam due to "enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account" being checked and some sort of problem.

Was saying it was checked a typo? My impression was that you wanted to (at least initially) disable all junk detection, rather than trying to fix it.

It doesn't sound like its due to the training data if it only occurs with your tiscali.it IMAP account.

A) It used to be easy to install a older version of Thunderbird in a different directory using custom setup and reuse the existing profile to test if a problem is version specific. It isn't anymore (version 68 and later) due to them tying a profile to a specific installation directory. If you want to try with the previous 78.* version see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Go_back_to_an ... hunderbird for a link to the older setup programs. After you install it when you run Thunderbird click on the about:profiles link in help -> troubleshooting information and press the "set as default profile" button for the desired profile. Hopefully since you would using the same major version you don't need to add a --allow-downgrade command line argument to the shortcut.

I assumed you used a Mozilla generic Linux implementation rather than the Thunderbird package provided by the distro. If the latter see if your package manager lets you install a older package without removing the existing one.

B) However if you think its due to the training data there used to be a "Bayes Junk Tool" that could be used to remove some of the tokens if the training data got too large or if some of the tokens was confusing it. The web site is gone but you can still download a binary for it via the wayback machine. Its a .jar file that requires you install a version of java (NOT javascript) in order to use it. I haven't used it for over a decade but it used to be useful if Thunderbird over time added hundred of identical tokens for both spam and non-spam, causing it to make bad decisions because it ignored the useful tokens. AFAIK the format of the training data file hasn't changed. Personally I'm not a fan of the adaptive junk mail controls, I think its too dumb.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160312132 ... ozdev.org/
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls

If you don't want to try that tool I suggest you move the training.dat file to some safe location and let Thunderbird start learning to recognize spam again. That will go quicker if you set mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold to 30. Bayesian filtering requires at least 100 bad messages be marked as spam AND 100 good messages marked as not junk to function. It needs both, you can't just identify tons of junk messages and expect it to learn.
mauromol
Posts: 12
Joined: March 25th, 2008, 2:43 am

Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by mauromol »

tanstaafl wrote: Was saying it was checked a typo? My impression was that you wanted to (at least initially) disable all junk detection, rather than trying to fix it.
No, it was not a typo. I do want SPAM to be detected. The thread topic is "flagging everything as junk mail", but it's not my case: only some mails, which were not flagged as SPAM by the incoming mail filtering process, are then flagged as SPAM once I click over them. So they are not ALL mails, but many. And this phenomenon did not happen with Thunderbird <= 68.x

I attached to this topic because, apart from the "everything" word (which could also be a hyperbole), the actual symptom is the same: mails being flagged as spam on click, after they were not flagged as such (and hence moved to the SPAM folder), therefore producing many false positives.

I believe it is a bug, I will consider to report it to Mozilla...
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tanstaafl
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Re: Thunderbird flagging everything as junk mail

Post by tanstaafl »

Please post a link to the bug report afterwards.
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