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JUNK MAIL CONTROLS INFO

Junk mail controls in SeaMonkey and Mozilla Thunderbird employ an adaptive filter. It must be trained before it will work. And as new types of spam arrive you should mark them accordingly to keep the filter effective. This is described in the reading links below but here's a quick rundown on how to train the filter.

To begin you must train the filter by identifying messages as being one of three types:

Then, take these actions: TIP! - Turn on the Junk status column so you can see what the status is. See the Junk Status page.

Junk Mail Controls Reading

More Advanced Reading


NOTES

First, retraining Mozilla JMC is not required after a program upgrade. Your junk mail database (training.dat) is stored in your profile which is not touched by a program upgrade.

As for accuracy of the filter, spammers are constantly reformulating their spam to try to be more effective and outguess filters, including the Bayesian-type filter used by Mozilla applications. This means (at least) that filter training is an ongoing process.

Every once in a while I notice the filter efficiency drop because of the changing spammer tactics. You can rename (or delete) your training.dat file and train a new one from scratch. Or just keep marking messages as either junk or not-junk to bring the filter up to date.


This page last changed: Sunday, July 26, 2015 - 01:12 PM USA Eastern Time

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