Thanks to the moral support from Reto and Michi, who both thought the idea was cool, I actually did what I said I would and set up Mozilla Thunderbird to leave spam in the inbox and put real mail in the spam-file. Kind of perverse really, and my first observation is that Thunderbird really wants you to do it the other way.
All the UI is geared to clicking on spam, which deletes it or moves it to the Spam folder. It’s not possible to get the manual and automatic spam filtering to put detected messages in the same place, unless that place is “Spam” (or Trash ;-) ) .
Reading the fine print on T-bird’s Adaptive Filter, it wants you to identify both junk and not junk. However it only provides you with a feature to toggle between junk and not junk. That is, if it thinks its junk, you can correct that, but you can’t take a good message and say, this is good. So most of the time, you’re not going to tell it about good mails, only bad ones.
Today, there were 564 good messages in my Inbox, which I used to train the filter. Another 80 Spam Messages, which I left alone. They are now in the Spam box.
So let’s see what comes in and where it lands. And the inbox is empty. So let’s see what happens…
