Thunderbird mail client observation.....

[Chuck Wintle]

The Thunderbird mail client allows users to train it to shunt junk email into a junk folder. It seems to work pretty well as for some time it did just that...the junk went into a separate folder, probably 10-15/day into the junk folder. Lately I have noticed, and perhaps coincidental, the number of junk email has dried up to almost nothing. Can this be just a coincidence?

[Larry Frank]

I love Thunderbird and have been using it for a couple of years. I like the way it trains but there are still new junk emails for me that I have to move and it has to learn.

[Jim Koepke]

Lately I have noticed, and perhaps coincidental, the number of junk email has dried up to almost nothing.

I am not familiar with Thunderbird. I know my mail reader lets me bounce email so it signals mail bots that the eddress is invalid.

Do you know if Thunderbird might be doing this?

With my mail reader I have to do it manually.

jtk

[David Masters]

Could be that the junk mail filtering your ISP does is becoming more effective.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Yeah - my thought would also be that more effective filtering at the mail server is catching more spam.
There's really nothing a mail client can do to prevent spam from getting to the mail server.
From the server down to you, yes, but, stopping spam at the mail server isn't something a client can control - - unless something has changed in that respect in the last couple years.

[Chuck Wintle]

Could be that the junk mail filtering your ISP does is becoming more effective.

That is something i did not think of...so it makes me wonder if thunderbird as it connects to the isp is possibly transmitting junk mail settings from Thunderbird to the isp filter?

[David Masters]

...makes me wonder if thunderbird as it connects to the isp is possibly transmitting junk mail settings from Thunderbird to the isp filter?

Thunderbird does not provide feedback to the ISP's filtering application from what I read on Mozilla's website.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Thunderbird does not provide feedback to the ISP's filtering application from what I read on Mozilla's website.

Nor would it be desirable to give a mail client the ability to provide that type of input to a mail server.

If that type of control over a mail server was granted, it wouldn't be long before someone figured out a piece of Malware that would have mail clients send false messages to the mail server that would block legitimate addresses.
Or even worse, it would open a path to the mail server that could be used to directly write false information about an address and bypass the mail client altogether.

[Steve Peterson]

I use outlook at work and typically get about 20-25 junk emails per day, even after they pre-filter most of the obvious "V I A K R A" adds. Mine dropped by 20% about 3 months ago after a long steady increase. It might be due to better pre-filtering. Maybe your ISP got a significantly better pre-filter.

Steve

[Kev Williams]

I don't let my server filter anything. What my server does do, is add [possible spam] to the subject line of what it considers spam. I have a mail rule that has OE move 'possible spam' email to its own folder, then I can look thru it. Normally it's a once daily batch "shift-delete" thing and it's gone. I also have my own blacklist that will delete mail from server before I ever see it.

The reason I self-filter is because nearly every day, 1 or 2 legit emails come in marked as spam, some of which are quite important.

[Brian Elfert]

I deal with a corporate anti-spam server. We average between 650 and 1000 spam emails per email account per day. 97.1% of all our email is spam. It would be hard for users to wade through hundreds of spams a day to find valid email.

We have seen a 20% or more decline in spam the past few weeks.