Rated 2 out of 5 stars

by RafaelLVx on Feb. 1, 2010 ·

I've always used Thunderbird's native spam filter because, after a month of "training", it is practically unbeatable, specially for people like me who get a lot of spam, even in comparison to SpamAssassin's filter. If I were to depend on SpamAssassin, a lot more spam would find its way into my Inbox.

Proof of this is Spamness. Using Spamness on my Trash folder, with about 2800 messages in it, including at least 2000 actual spam messages, it only tagged about 10 messages or so. Thunderbird detected all that spam for me, whereas Spamness or SpamAssassin didn't have much clue.

I'm thinking the obvious way to work this out would be to add Thunderbird's spam training information to the equation, but I don't know if that's possible or within the scope of this extension (I'm not a programmer myself).

Finally, I really found this extension to be a great idea. I sure hope it gets to improves over these flaws and wish I could help more with this improvement.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.3). 

by Ryan Lee (Developer) on Feb. 2, 2010 ·

Hi, add-on author here. This sounds like a review and rating of SpamAssassin, which is why I've flagged it. SpamAssassin is a server-side piece of software. Spamness merely reads SA's data. It does no active detection or tagging on its own inside Thunderbird as TB's junk mail component does, it just displays SA's analysis.

Thanks for going through the trouble of trying it out. It does sound like you might want your server admin to check out your SpamAssassin installation. Mine works so well in concert with TB's junk detection that I barely pay attention to spam anymore. I wrote about it recently: http://ryanlee.org/journal/view/6390/