How to quickly block a sender?

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FrankSMS
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Joined: February 9th, 2017, 4:03 pm

How to quickly block a sender?

Post by FrankSMS »

As spam is the most hated part of email you'd think any thinking email program designer would integrate a very quick keyboard shortcut into their system to quickly block and delete a sender. I see nothing in Thunderbird to make this happen. In this program I have to open the message in its own window, right click the sender then set up a filter. Why? Do you people not ever get spam? How can this be an intelligent design choice? One fast keyboard shortcut should delete the message and block all further messages from that sender! If these people made a car they'd forget to put in the gas tank.
Hopefully I'm wrong and there is a quick and easy way of accomplishing this. But if there is they have sure have hidden it well. And you have to question the intelligence of that.
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DanRaisch
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Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by DanRaisch »

Apparently you missed Thunderbird's Junk Mail Controls. Activate that and you can either click on the "Junk" indicator in the message list display or press "J" when the message is highlighted in the list display.
FrankSMS
Posts: 351
Joined: February 9th, 2017, 4:03 pm

Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by FrankSMS »

Does that show me how to quickly block a sender and delete the message, hopefully with a keyboard shortcut? Anybody that spends has any experience with spam knows full well that junk/spam filters are so useless, constantly catching legit mail incorrectly. Its so incredible how the designers think their product works when, if they used it in real life, would realize its a dismal failure.

What we need is a fast way of: Blocking the sender and deleting the message.

So that is disappointing. Looks like Thunderbird forgot to implement this. Remember to include an engine if you ever design a car. Or maybe you can just filter your task list so you don't really need to go anywhere. That'll work!

Maybe there's an extension from someone who actually thinks for this task?

Why do so many stupid people design technology? When I'm online I see the same Google ads over and over. Do they think that is effective advertising? Is that good market penetration? I think not. You go to a website and its so littered with popups you leave. Is that effective? Most of the lost productivity in the world is because of idiot techies that don't have a logical bone in their body. There seems to be so little common sense in this field. Everywhere else I see an abundance of common sense. But not technology. Its like the curse of modern man. And its never going to change unless the public raises their standards.
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DanRaisch
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Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by DanRaisch »

If you haven't tried the Junk Mail Controls in Thunderbird don't be so quick to dismiss them. You may find they are better than you anticipate. They can move the marked messages to a Junk folder so they can be reviewed before deletion to avoid deleting false positives, or they can move them directly to the Trash folder. The system will learn which messages the user considers Junk and can be set to use one or more of Thunderbird's address books as a white list so messages from senders in those books will never be marked as Junk. Messages that are mistaken marked as Junk can be marked by the user as Not Junk to help the system become more user specific.

You could also check to see if your email provider offers filtering or blocking functionality so the messages would never get to Thunderbird. Or consider installing a program like Spam Assassin that may consider to be functional than the built in Junk Mail Controls. Thunderbird will recognize and accept input from Spam Assassin when it identifies messages as spam.
FrankSMS
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Joined: February 9th, 2017, 4:03 pm

Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by FrankSMS »

I have tried them and almost immediately they assumed legit email was junk. Useless if you value your time.

The whole premise of junk filtering is silly because the spammers know the techniques and avoid them.
FrankSMS
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Joined: February 9th, 2017, 4:03 pm

Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by FrankSMS »

I've actually had the Junk mail control activated with Spam Assassin for several days as an experiment. Its success rate is utterly putrid. It catches some but misses a lot. Then it pegs legit email as junk.

There is a very effective way of dealing with junk mail: Change your email address.
Adrian Bell
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Re: How to quickly block a sender?

Post by Adrian Bell »

As spammers almost never send from the same email address twice, blocking one particular sender is a pretty pointless thing to do. If you are getting "spam" from the same address you probably signed up for it and could try unsubscribing. The junk mail controls in Thunderbird will need more than a couple of days to learn, and no junk mail filters can be 100% effective.
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