Microsoft’s Outlook Express is a scarce memory to me. I have used Mozilla’s Thunderbird Email software for at least a couple of years now. I couldn’t be happier.

What brings my ideal fantasy dream of forever using my own name as my email address crashing to the ground is the amount of spam I receive on it. I’m not sure where I went wrong. I get about 20 spam emails a day. I know that’s not alot, per se, but I wanted this email address to remain chaste forever.

Using Thunderbird does make the dream still remain though. It has a great ‘Junk Mail’ filter that trashes 99% of the spam as it comes in. I went a long time without ever setting it up. I finally did and am rightously glad.

Setting up your Thunderbird Junk Mail Filter

1. Click ‘Tools’ > ‘Junk Mail Controls…’
2. In the ‘Settings’ tab check the desired controls

I use ‘Local Folders’ for Account. Yours will depend on how you have your folders configured on the left hand side.

I’ve checked the ‘Do not mark messages as junk mail if the sender is in my address book:’

I’ve checked the ‘Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail to:’

Clicked the radio button ‘Junk’ Folder on Local Folders

Checked the ‘Automatically delete junk messages older than 1 days from this folder’ (Although for me, this doesn’t seem to work. They just build up in my ‘Junk’ folder)

I’ve checked ‘When I manually mark messages as Junk’

Clicked the radio button ‘Move them to the Junk folder’ (Your choice. I put them there so if I accidentally send one to junk it doesn’t get deleted)

I’ve checked the ‘When displaying HTML messages marked as junk, snatize the HTML’ box.

For the first week I had to ‘train’ Thunderbird what was junk mail. It would display a message at the top of my email screen saying ‘Thunderbird thinks this message is junk mail’. It gave me a button to press to confirm that. After a few days, all those types of junk mail were sent directly to the ‘Junk’ mail folder.

If you don’t have a good junk mail solution…I recommend Thunderbird.

If you have Thundebird and haven’t set up the junk mail controls…whatcha waitin’ on?

If you have an undeniable, bias and general distaste for all things Microsoft…get Thunderbird!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.