Two Thunderbird steps forward, one Thunderbird step back
Thunderbird continues to amaze me.1
One feature that I hadn't started using until a couple of weeks ago was Thunderbird's built-in spam detection. I mostly didn't use it because it looked like it never worked. It didn't mark anything as spam, and I thought "Well, this is a crappy filter."
It turns out that I was just a crappy user.
You have to train it to recognize the spam by tagging spam messages as junk. Then it learns from this, and actually starts detecting the spam. Who knew?
(Yes, yes... this may seem obvious to some, but... try not to laugh. I come from a spamassassin/mutt-based world, where most of the spam detection heuristics used are either network-based or based in rules that ship with the software. I didn't expect that I'd have to actively train Thunderbird, because I was expecting a spamassassin-like experience. I also haven't seen any obvious documentation on this aspect of Thunderbird, a problem I know Sheppy is hard at work fixing, which is awesome.)
Now that I've trained it, and setup a filter to auto-move spam to junk, my inbox is much cleaner. And it seemingly hasn't [incorrectly] grabbed any ham yet.
In talking with Scott about it, he said optimally, you should mark about 20-50 messages as ham, in addition to marking spam the filter doesn't catch. This helps build its ruleset so that it understands what kind of ham your inbox gets. This feature isn't as "discoverable" as marking messages as spam; you have to go to Message -> Mark -> As Not Junk (aka Shift+J).
The other cool "Wow, it just works" Thunderbird feature I ran into that really impressed me was a message that had "^2" in it. Thunderbird (correctly) rendered this in the message as a superscript "2".
Today, I bit the bullet and begrudgingly moved work-related blog-reading over to [the new incarnation of] Google Reader. I had been using Thunderbird for this task, but I have an installation of Thunderbird on my work laptop and work desktop, and I found that because it has no way2 of syncing the read-lists of blog posts I've read, I either a) don't use it, or b) have to wade through a bunch of posts I've already read.
We'll see how it goes with Google Reader, but I'd rather use Thunderbird. I'm not a huge fan of not-knowing what data Google Reader is collecting about what I may (or may not) be reading.
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1 To be clear, in the good way...
2 That I know of?
Comments
Thunderbird's spam filtering was the only reason I kept using it every day. It caught every single bit, with only two false negatives, and no false positives.
For the gui mouse oriented people, if you have the junk column in your message view enabled, you can just click in the column and it will flip the junk bit.
Thunderbird's RSS capabilities broke my heart though. Theres no decent feed reader for Windows.
Posted by: Scott Perry | October 17, 2006 5:35 PM
Does anyone else have the problem of duplicated entries in their feeds in Thunderbird 2.0 beta 1? I've checked the RSS and it's not that, so it must be a problem with Thunderbird itself. It "re-recognises" posts it's already got when you do a "Check this account", sometimes up to four times...
I've searched Bugzilla and can't find much. Yes, I know I should file a bug...
Posted by: Gerv | October 20, 2006 5:35 AM
If I had the time, I'd try it out again, but I removed the spam column from Thunderbird because I was never able to get it to stop classifying my ham as spam. This is odd since nothing gets to Thunderbird until it's already been put through the whole anti-spam system on my server. Very very little Thunderbird ever sees is spam, it just seems to think it all is (spam). I suspect this is at least partly because I'm on SPAM-L and spamtools, and there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Thunderbird to ignore that mail when doing whatever it is it does.
It still thinks every mail I get from LiveJournal is a phishing scam for some reason.
Posted by: Ron | October 22, 2006 7:31 AM
You said that you're using T-bird on a laptop and a desktop and have trouble synching them?
Try portable T-bird. I'm on the road a lot. So I put portable T-bird on a Seagate 5GB pocket drive. Now I can check email from the desktop, my notebook and from any Internet connected 'puter running Win XP. Pretty cool!
Posted by: Charles Brown | October 23, 2006 5:21 PM
I've been using Thunderbird for decades and the spam filter is one of the reasons why. It will sometimes grab some ham and sometimes miss some spam, but overall it's highly accurate.
Posted by: Tony | October 23, 2006 6:08 PM
I've also got your problem with Thunderbird's RSS reading. You're not able to share your feeds and the read status on two machines. A good complete sycnhing utility is needed for this. Thunderbird should definitely look into this.
Posted by: Jon Prichard | October 23, 2006 6:10 PM
I love T-Bird's spam filter and it is one of the main reasons I continue to use it. The only problem I have had with it is when I have accidently marked ham as spam (the junk flag is right next to read status, argh). I will re-mark the items as "not junk" but it seems to mess up the training and I will invariably start getting false hits. However, you can go in and reset the filter if you are getting too many ham messages caught and retrain the filter again. I have had to do this several times.
Posted by: Latisha | October 24, 2006 9:45 AM
I like the spam-detection feature too. That's the biggest reason I dumped Outlook Express. Once in a long while, it eats some hams, but overall, it is very effective. The thing I wonder is that can I train my scam filter too?
Posted by: waruwaru | October 24, 2006 11:51 AM
> really impressed me ... rendered ... as a superscript "2".
Thanks :)
Posted by: Ben Bucksch | October 25, 2006 4:39 AM
About Google, collecting user data...
Why does everybody whine so much about Google, collecting users' web surfing and reading habits? (Aka in Google Reader)
What bad would it do, if Google knew that I wasn't interested in fashion models, but instead very keen on new shiny portable PCs? The only result coming I see is that, they can show me more about what I already ask. If, the opposite happens, like Google showing me more Ads. about the things i like... Then I'll just change my mind and do not use it anymore. The power of free will. Astonishing, isn't it?
By the way, I love thunderbird but It's so silly my E-series nokia still cannot sync. contacts and calendar with it :(
Posted by: Emre SUMENGEN | September 19, 2007 3:14 AM