Thunderbird / Mozilla Mail For Spam Control

MozillaeWeek has a nice article reviewing various add-on programs for spam filtering in e-mail, as well as several native e-mail applications that have some spam filtering built-in. Their verdict: “Qurb 2.0 and Mozilla 1.5 did the best job of filtering while providing users with a good level of control.”

I don’t have any experience with the stand-alone Qurb application, but I can say that the new version of Mozilla Mail does a great job with its Bayesian spam filtering. Mozilla Mail is integrated into the Mozilla 1.5 suite of applications, but it is also available as a standalone e-mail application known as Thunderbird, which is what I have transitioned to from Eudora. Possibly the only downside with Mozilla’s implementation of Bayesian filtering is that you need to “train” the application for a period of time by marking e-mails as junk. However, the program quickly learns what to mark as junk on its own, and this approach results in almost no false positives, which the article points out is a large failing of some of the other applications.

I know from personal experience that most people are a lot more invested in e-mail applications than web browsers, so I imagine Mozilla Thunderbird will be a harder sell than Mozilla Firebird or the Mozilla Browser Suite. Still, I can highly recommend it personally; I liked it enough to ditch Eudora after over five years, so that should tell you something…

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