Spam Filter Setup Guide

Mozilla Thunderbird

The following guide will help you in adding junk detection rules.

Jump to: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4

Step 1

After launching Thunderbird go to your tools drop down menu and click "Message Filters..."

Step 2

In the Message Filters window you just opened, click the "New..." button

Step 3

After clicking the "New..." button, a new window will appear entitled Filter Rules. This is where we will begin to define the rules that determine whether an email is sent straight to the Trash.

Enter in a name for your filter, I called mine Anti-Spam but you can name it whatever you like. In the top "For incoming messages that:" section make sure the "Match any of the following" button is selected, now you're ready to start entering common spam terms that will send offending messages straight to the trash. There are two drop down menus for our purposes the first one will either be Body or Subject, and the second will always be Contains. Now we're ready to start entering some common terms contained in spam messages, the most common ones I come across are Viagra, Casino, Gambling, Hot Stocks, Loans, Rolex, and then there are variations of these like V1agra that some spammers use to trick stupid spam filters. Look through any spam messages that are already contained in your inbox or junk folders, there should be some common terms that you can use to set up these filters. It's more than likely the term will be within the body of the message, if so then select Body as the first drop down menu, enter the term into the text box and click the + button next to the term you just entered, this creates a second rule where you enter another term to be filtered for. You can add as many rules to your filter as you would like.

In the bottom section Perform these actions: select "Move Message to" in the first drop down menu, and "Trash on Local Folders" in the second drop down menu. Now click the OK button.

Step 4

You've successfully setup a new mail message filter. If your inbox is cluttered with spam, highlight your new filter, and on the bottom of the Message Filters window there is a "Run selected filter(s) on:" drop down menu choose inbox, or any other folder that is cluttered with spam and then click the Run Now button. This will take any messages that match the criteria in your filter and move them to the trash. Once you've double checked to make sure there are no legitimate messages that got caught in the filter you can empty the trash.