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Mozilla Spam-Filtering FAQ
Dan Mosedale and Seth Spitzer
  1. How do regular message filters interact with the spam filtering code?
  2. Why is the "Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail" option disabled?
  3. Why can't I use this on news accounts?
  4. Why does it think all my new mail is junk?  How do I train it?
  5. Does training for one mail account affect another?

How do regular message filters interact with the spam filtering code?

Regular filters take precedence. However, once a message has reached it's final destination (ie been filtered to a folder), the first time you open that folder will cause new messages in that folder to be spam-classified.

Why is the "Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail" option disabled?

There are still some known bugs in that code. We don't want anyone testing this feature to inadvertantly lose data. It will be turned on as soon as it's ready.  Update:  it's turned on as of 1/12/2003.

Why can't I use the this on news account?

We haven't done the work yet.  We might one day.  If we did, you would not be able to "move" news messages, just detect them (and ignore / hide them)

Why does it think all my new mail is junk?  How do I train it?

The application needs to be trained on both junk and non-junk. 
To get good results, you need to correct it when it mis-labels messages as junk when they are not junk.  (and vice versa)
For example, to correct a message incorrectly labeled as junk, you can:
  • click the junk icon in the thread pane for that message (3 pane only)
  • select the message and hit the Junk toolbar button
  • use "Tools | Mark Selected Messages as Not Junk"
  • [coming soon] use the "This is Not Junk" button in the message pane, see (http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/spam/images/Spam5.gif)\
Does training for one mail account affect another?

Yes.  While you can enable or configure the junk mail controls on a per account basis, the training data is cross accounts.  So if you have a pop and an imap account, and you train the pop account that certain messages are junk, the imap account benefits from that training.