reset adaptive junk training?

[danll]

I'm using Thunderbird on my Mac (Monterey), and I have it set up to access five e-mail accounts. In precisely ONE POP account (comcast.net, as it happens), the adaptive junk filter hardly works at all. In the other accounts, it does. Very well. In fact, on a separate Win7 machine, Thunderbird handles all the junk on this one account very handily. So something is wrong on my Mac. I see I can reset the adaptive junk filter globally on Thunderbird, but I want to do it JUST for that one account. I don't want to screw up what it does properly on the other accounts. How do I do that?

[DanRaisch]

Do you have the same five accounts set up on each machine? If so, you could try renaming the file "training.dat" on the Mac to "trainingdat.old" and then copying over the training.dat file from the Win7 system (where the Comcast account is handled properly) to the Mac. That should cause the Junk Mail Controls on the Mac to perform in the same way that they do on the Win7 system.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

[danll]

No, the account I'm talking about is the only one on the Win7 machine. Is it the case that the training.dat file applies to ALL accounts on one machine? That is, the file isn't account-specific? That would be a shame. But that also makes it a little hard to understand how the training is working well on some accounts, and not on another. Should I decide to just reset the whole Thunderbird junk training on my Mac and have it all start over for all accounts, what is the most complete way to do that? I fear that if I just "Reset Training Data" it'll just start over, and keep doing what it's doing. I do understand that there is a Thunderbird config setting you can set that changes the strength of the Bayesian junk filter, but it isn't obvious that that will help.

[DanRaisch]

Is it the case that the training.dat file applies to ALL accounts on one machine? That is, the file isn't account-specific?

Yes, that is what it means. Junk Mail Controls can be switched on or off per account but the training data is stored in a directory above those of the individual accounts.

[quote[ But that also makes it a little hard to understand how the training is working well on some accounts, and not on anothe[/quote]
The training data relates to specific senders, messages, message characteristics, etc. Those could easily be common to multiple accounts. Equally, some issues might be unique to a given account, resulting in better detection in some accounts than in others, particularly if the user actively marks messages as Junk and/or Not Junk as appropriate.

Have you confirmed that the Junk Controls are active for that Comcast account on the Mac?

[danll]

Junk controls are all active on the Mac. Junk setting are the same on the Mac as for the Win7 machine. But for some reason, the Win7 machine catches almost all of the junk,and the Mac catches maybe 5-10% of that. The Mac has been "training" on this for several months now.

[danll]

I'm going to report back that I finally got exasperated enough that I just trashed the offending account completely, and rebuilt it from scratch. Folders, filters, etc. Took the better part of an hour. Looks to me that the problem is entirely fixed. For this account ALL spam/junk is now being properly flagged and filtered. The lesson is that junk-wise, an account can just get screwed.