sasquatch wrote:I can't believe that it would get confused if you mark and then re-mark them. Isn't it flagged one of two ways, either junk or not junk? I don't see where any "confusion" would come from.
The flagging is just the user-friendly way Thunderbird tells you which category it thinks the message fits into based on statistical analysis.
Bayesian filters work by giving individual words a score for each category (in Thunderbird's case, junk and not-junk). Thunderbird calculates the probability that a message fits into a category based on the scores for each word it contains. When you mark a mail either way, you affect the scores for all the words in that message. So when you mark a message as junk, the junk score for each word is increased. When you then mark it as not-junk, the not-junk scores are increased. If you do this a few times you will reduce the effectiveness of the filter, because the scores are no longer an accurate representation of the spam/not spam probability.
Basically, flagging isn't the simple on/off switch that it appears to be.
(For people with a more technical understanding of exactly how it works, I apologise if I've used bad terminology here!)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
Thunderbird 1.0 (20041206)
EMbuttons: Buttons & options for the Extension Manager. Easy Get Mail Button is here too.