{"id":1070,"date":"2004-04-07T23:57:58","date_gmt":"2004-04-07T23:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1070.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"backing-off-of-thunderbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2004\/04\/07\/backing-off-of-thunderbird\/","title":{"rendered":"Backing off of Thunderbird"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my main email client for the last couple of weeks, but the experiment is coming to an end, and I’m moving back to Outlook again. Two main reasons: spam, and unstable message filters.<\/p>\n

I have been using SpamBayes<\/a> for Outlook to filter spam for almost a year now<\/a>, and it rocks. After spending a couple of months double-checking its assessments of what is spam and what isn’t, I found that it was never<\/em> issuing false positives, that is, categorizing good messages (“ham”) as junk. If it encounters a message that it is unsure about, it puts it in a “Possible Spam” folder, which I check manually every couple of days. Some messages that end up here are real, and some are junk. As soon as I sort them appropriately, though, SpamBayes analyses their characteristics, and improves its odds of filing similar messages correctly in the future. Very rarely, maybe once or twice a week, an actual piece of spam will make it past SpamBayes and get into my inbox. A similar re-training process follows.<\/p>\n

Thunderbird stacks up poorly against SpamBayes in three ways:<\/p>\n