160. Handle Junk Mail  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 154 Get Your Email
 SEE ALSO 161 Organize Incoming Mail
160. Handle Junk Mail 
Unfortunately, even with the convenience of almost instant communication through email , there's a downsideanyone who has your address can send you email. This means that, just like your mail box at home, you can't prevent junk mail (spam) from arriving. Although your email service provider might provide some spam controls (and you should enable them, when they're available), the truth is that because large email providers are typically targeted by spammers, spam gets through anyway. What you can do with junk mail that gets through, however, is to teach Thunderbird what to do with itfrom moving it into a special folder so that you can review it when you have time, to simply deleting it as soon as it arrives. | 1. | Choose Tools, Junk Mail Controls
Choose Tools, Junk Mail Controls from the menu. The Junk Mail Controls dialog box appears.
| | 2. | Select Account
Open the Configure Junk Settings for list, and select the email account for which you want to set junk mail controls. Here, I selected Local Folders, which covers both of my email accounts (both accounts are under the Local Folders heading in the Folders list of the main Thunderbird window).
| | 3. | Select Desired Settings
On the Settings tab, select the junk mail options you want. Under White Lists , you can make sure that emails from people in your address book are not marked as junk.
Under Handling, you can tell Thunderbird what to do with junk mail. You can move the junk mail to a special folder or delete the messages.
Under Logging , click the Junk Mail Log button to create a file that tracks junk mail activity. You might use such a file to track what happened to a particular message, for example.
| | 4. | Enable Junk Mail Filtering
Unless you want to manually mark all junk mail messages, you should turn on junk mail filtering. Click the Adaptive Filter tab and turn on the Enable adaptive junk mail detection option. Click OK .
| | 5. | Mark Junk Mail
To get the most out of Thunderbird's junk mail adaptive filter, you should mark specific messages as junk when they come in. That way, Thunderbird learns to identify the type of junk mail you get and takes care of similar messages in the future.
To mark a message as junk, select it and choose Message, Mark, As Junk or click the Junk Mail button to the right of the Sender column in the message header.
|  TIP If you've accidentally marked a message as junk, select the message again, and you'll see a note from Thunderbird (just above the message header detail) telling you that it thinks this message is junk mail. Click the Not Junk button to remove the message's junk mail status.
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