Comments on: How Thunderbird’s Scam Detection Works

By: Tim Draper

Tim Draper — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:29:08 +0000

Unbelievable that Thunderbird’s only options are “always on” and “always off”. So if you constantly get emails from one account that aren’t scams and want to turn the warning off for that address only, you turn off ALL warnings. Seriously? /sigh

By: Kagehi

Kagehi — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:29:41 +0000

Yeah. I find it bloody stupid too. There are **only** two things it ever marks as scams:

1. Emails from Eve Online.
2. Emails from Second Life, but only if it contains a URL for playing streaming media, such as a DJ announcing that they will be streaming in sim X, at Y time, and connect to Z address to hear it, if you are not in the sim.

In terms of actual scams… Its like fracking using Hotmail. Hotmail also has this problem. I have gotten dozens of emails from viagra sellers, a few from the “I just found money in my sock, but the Zipfordian government wants it, give me an account number and you can keep some of it!”, sort of BS, etc. All of them getting through the damn filters. What does get trapped? Umm… In the case of Hotmail it always seems to, invariably, be new emails from someone that may *vaguely*, in some fashion, compete with one of their products… Gosh.. Wonder how that happens…

Near as I can figure, Microsuck must get kick backs from Nigerian scammers and viagra people, or they just haven’t found a competing product to sell, which would require blocking everyone else selling the these things. lol

But, yeah. Having Thunderbird pull the same stupid BS, and not give me any way to say, “Stop doing this from servers belonging to these people!”, is just irritating.

By: William Furr

William Furr — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:32:09 +0000

Thanks for the tip! I’d prefer to be able to whitelist an individual sender, but disabling the feature entirely works as well in my particular case.

In fact, it’s the email reports from our organization’s spam filtering software that get marked as possible scams, because the link to ‘delete all suspected spam’ is to a local IP address. Pretty ironic.

By: David

David — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:55:01 +0000

All I can say is that if you follow some of these simple rules stated out in the blog post you will find that your email is less likely to be marked as a possible scam.

For those who are having trouble, take a look at the subject line and the actual content. What links you go to.

Ideally, it should all go to the same address.

Although I have had the occasional email marked as a scam, I can easily overcome it by following these rules.

Great Post!

By: CJ

CJ — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:40:55 +0000

I love how everyone is saying how ‘stupid’ and ‘useless’ this is. My opinion is, as lewwwy put it, is that anything that helps less experienced users from falling victim is better than nothing.

In a large scale interactive environment, applications can only hold your hand so far, and nothing will replace learning the culture and ways of the internet, just like you learn how to pick scam artists in the street. What Thunderbird is doing is giving a headstart on that.

By: Roxanne

Roxanne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:32:59 +0000

Well…here it is March of 2009 and Thunderbird’s scam filter is still a pain in the a$$!! I am so glad I found your post to figure out how to turn it off. I just recently began using Thunderbird and googled to find this post. Thanks a bunch.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:02:21 +0000

Thanks very much for the instructions on how to disable it – I only get this email scam warning on one kind of email, the daily Bible reading notes I get through my inbox every day ><

Cheers

By: goldi

goldi — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:13:52 +0000

Well, here it is – March of 2008 – and this “feature” continues to be useless! For whatever reason, it has always (and consistently) marked one particular newsletter that I get as a possible email scam. The first thing I tried was adding the newsletter email to my addy book. Nope, still coming through flagged!

Finding the place to turn this “scam-checking” feature off was like looking for a needle in a haystack, until I found this blog entry. Thanks for the VERY useful info!

By: Gus

Gus — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 04:04:11 +0000

It’s all about adding the sender to your address book. If you are never going to send them an email (autoresponders etc), put them in a separate address book and call it something like “whitelist”. Then you only have to click “Not a scam” once and it should remember this setting.

By: Helen

Helen — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:42:58 +0000

I have hunted for this on Mozilla website and could not find it in ANY of their support help/forums/FAQ.

So I can either have it OFF or reporting stuff that isnt a scam and no way of stopping it carrying on about particular emails.

Why is there no fix for this yet?