| By Andrew Ruggerio |
Configuring Junk Mail Controls in Thunderbird
Thunderbird's Junk Mail Controls are designed to evaluate incoming mail and identify messages that are likely to be junk or spam. Once enabled, these controls complement the RCI spam filter to provide an increased level of spam filtering.
1. Using your mouse, navigate to Tools > Junk Mail Controls in the Thunderbird menu.
2. The Junk Mail Controls utility window will appear with a variety of options, some of which you need to address:
- Email Account: Make sure your RCI account or your name is listed on the Configure Junk Settings for line.
- Settings:
- Check the box that tells Thunderbird not to mark mail as junk if the sender is in your personal address book.
- Check the box that tells Thunderbird to trust junk mail headers sent by SpamAssassin.
- Handling:
- Check the box that tells Thunderbird to Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail.
- Select the radio button next to Other and use the pull-down to indicate where you would like the junk mail to be moved. If you are using the RCI spam filter, you may want to send junk messages to the AUTO-DELETED-SPAM folder, which is a subfolder of your RCI Inbox.
- Check the box next to When I manually mark messages as Junk.
- Select the radio button next to Delete them.
- Check the box that tells Thunderbird to sanitize HTML messages that are marked as junk.
3. Next, click the second tab in the Junk Mail Controls utility box, Adaptive Filter.
- Adaptive Filter: Check the box to enable adaptive junk mail detection. With this feature enabled you can 'train' Thunderbird to learn what is junk mail and what is not, so that in the future it will automatically mark a message junk if you've had similar messages before.
4. Click OK and you are done configuring Junk Mail Controls.
5. To train the junk mail controls, you need to mark messages that you've received as either "junk" or "not junk", and it's important that you mark both types of messages rather than simply the ones that are junk.
There are a several ways to mark messages as junk so that they move automatically into the folder you designated:
- Click the small dot in the Junk Status column of the message list, so that it changes to a
trashcan. The column header is marked by the
symbol.
- Select the message and then click the junk button on the Thunderbird toolbar.
- Right click on a message and select Mark - As Junk.
- Select a range of messages to mark as junk by clicking on the first one, pressing and holding the Shift key, and then clicking on the last one. Then click on the junk button on the Thunderbird toolbar or right click on the group of highlighted messages and select Mark - As Junk.
- Select a group of nonconsecutive messages to mark as junk by clicking on the first one, pressing and holding the CTRL key, and clicking on each of the individual messages that you want to designate as junk. Once all of the messages are highlighted, click on the junk button on the Thunderbird toolbar or right click on one of the highlighted messages and select Mark - As Junk.
To mark a message as not junk so that Thunderbird learns to recognize messages that should not be treated as junk:
- Right click on a message and select Mark - As Not Junk.
- Select a range of messages to mark as not junk by clicking on the first one, pressing and holding the Shift key, and then clicking on the last one. Then right click on the group of highlighted messages and select Mark - As Not Junk.
- Select a group of nonconsecutive messages to mark as not junk by clicking on the first one, pressing and holding the CTRL key, and clicking on each of the individual messages that you want to designate as not junk. Once all of the messages are highlighted, right click on one of the highlighted messages and select Mark - As Not Junk.