Much to the joy of many here, I'm sure, I've successfully switched over to Mozilla email and web clients. So far I am enjoying them, and I like the general feel of the programs. Firefox also seems faster at some things than IE (except for loading, but only by a little).

Thunderbird is a little behind in being an MS replacement, though. I have small annoyances with it, but they're pretty numerous.

The first one I don't expect to be able to do anything about, but I simply don't like being forced into having a seperate, complete set of folders for each email account. It might be nice as an option, but it takes up a lot of space in the folder view, especially when I have around 20 folders in my main account already. Anyway, I'm getting used to it, but I hope I don't have to add too many more accounts.

The main thing that's bugging me at the moment is the built in spam filter. The Spambayes plugin for Outlook was just a small project written by someone outside the Spambayes project, and it worked much better. I'm not talking about its effectiveness, but how usable it was.

For instance, I don't see any way to really train the spam filter other than over time. I imported over 2000 spam messages from outlook, and I think the process of marking them all junk at once may have trained it, but I have no idea.

Another thing I like about Spambayes was the simple operation. There were two buttons, depending on the folder you were in, and you had plenty of options on how they were used. In Thunderbird, there's an option that should mimic the "Delete as spam" button, but it simply doesn't work. Plus, there definitely seems to be a bug in the options window:



Why would the option under "Move them to my "Junk" folder" be greyed out? I have a junk folder, and the parent checkbox is checked, and I see no connection to the previous option. So, is this a bug? It gets un-greyed when the previous option is checked, but then it still doesn't do anything when I mark something as junk.

Any ideas?

Overall I'm very happy with it, and I enjoy figuring out these new programs. They still have quirks that I need to work out, but I enjoy solving them.

Each account needs to have "Enable adaptive junk mail detection" turned on. Go thru all you accounts by first changing the account on the settings tab then click on the Adaptive Filter tab and verify that "Enable adaptive junk mail detection" is checked. I remember reading that sometimes it will get turned off on the non primary account.

As for me when I click the junk button on the menu or press "j" on the keyboard when looking at junk mail it moves it to my Junk mail folder. Now to delete the junk mail, click on your junk mail folder -> Click Tools -> Delete Mail Marked as Junk in Folder and this moves all my mail into the Trash. Next time I restart it is all gone.

*edit* I just checked, and all my accounts have that setting enabled. *edit*

Where does Thunderbird store the information it needs to identify junk mail? I wouldn't want to delete my junk mail if I need it in the future to retrain the filter. Is it in the Thunderbird profiles?

They are stored in training.dat in the Profile folder

Path for mine is
C:\Documents and Settings\Chad\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\r736qp23.slt\

Well, I've figured out how to make the junk filter do what I want. Basically, I need to delete the training.dat file, change the settings, and "retrain" the filter.

I still really dislike how it works, though. I can enable that option to move the messages to the junk mail folder, but despite having an actual junk mail folder (enabled in another option), this option declares that the junk mail folder is whatever is used in the previous option. So, if I've chosen a different folder in "other," that has now become the new junk mail folder. Basically, these two options are definitely linked to each other when they should be independent.

I also don't like how the training works, because I can't seem to tell the filter what isn't junk, which I would think would be just as helpful.

Anyway, this is a little disappointing. I just hope people recognize that just because something isn't MS doesn't mean there aren't problems with it.