One of the reasons I started using Thunderbird was its (at the time) excellent Spam filters. After a few clicks, it identified 80 or 90% of the incoming Spam and filed it away.
Unfortunately, the spammers fight back. I was reminded of this last night when I checked my private email for the first time in 36 hours - 187 messages of which exactly 13 were messages that I might actually want to read.
Roughly half of the rest were identified by either Thunderbird or SpamAssassin as Spam. But the rest — some 80 messages — were advertisements for penny stocks disguised as fudge brownie recipes; neither tool recognized them as Spam.
Maybe this is the wrong approach. If 90% of all email is spam, then maybe we should just assume all email is spam, unless proven otherwise. Maybe it is easier to identify real mail than spam.
I am going to try a little experiment. I am going to reset the training data of Thunderbird's junk mail controls and reverse the usage. I'm going to call real mail spam. So the "Junk" folder becomes the receptacle for potentially interesting email. Seems perverse, but real mail isn't trying to cloak its identity.
Has anyone tried this approach? Anyone want to try it with me and compare results....?
