Comments on: How Thunderbird’s Scam Detection Works

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?

By: Back to Basics: Phish by Phone | K-Squared Ramblings

Back to Basics: Phish by Phone | K-Squared Ramblings — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:18:33 +0000

[...] And of course by not using sneaky technical tricks in the message, it’s harder for tools like ClamAV, spam filters, or mail clients to detect. [...]

By: Charlie Sears

Charlie Sears — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 20:44:20 +0000

The scam detection in Thunderbird is useful to me, because it finds messages where the URL doesn’t match the text. It doesn’t hit on messages from my banks, but does hit on the scams, so I keep it turned on. I get a few false positives, but not many.

Maybe I’m using a later version of Thunderbird than described here, and perhaps some things have been fixed.

By: Simon Mikkelsen

Simon Mikkelsen — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:43:26 +0000

I have only seen it flag one mailinglist – one that I publish

But if it works so badly as described, it is useless for everybody. When you cry woolf all the time.

When the rules are so simple and general, the phishers would probably run their scams through the filter, to make sure it passes. Then the filter makes things worse by giving a false sense of security.

By: Jyatushtira

Jyatushtira — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:25:17 +0000

But wait! This works! In the user.js file in your
.mozilla or .thunderbird or whatever directory,
add the line:
user_pref(”mail.phishing.detection.enabled”, false);

By: Jyatushtira

Jyatushtira — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:57:12 +0000

Sorry, I guess it doesn’t work…

By: Jyatushtira

Jyatushtira — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:02:47 +0000

In Seamonkey on Linux, and presumably in Mozilla, and Thunderbird you can type
“about:config” in the location bar to enable configuring many options, some of which are not found through the preferences dialogues.

In the list of settings shown in “about:config” is one called:
mail.phishing.detection.enabled
Setting this to false seems to shut off the phishing detection.
I don’t know if it works on other operating systems.

By: BobHobbit

BobHobbit — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:39:02 +0000

I think this scam detection thing fails on all fronts… not only does it mark almost all my legitimate newsletters and mailings from sites like eBay, credit cards, etc. as scams, but it fails to catch a few obvious phishing emails. Would have been a great feature if it actually worked.