Routing Email from Unknown Senders to Suspect Mailbox

[Kurt Kramer]

I have left Mindspring/Earthlink as my ISP. They DID have a good e-
mail application though. What I liked about it was this: Unless an e-
mail was from a sender saved in my Address Book, the e-mail was kept
out of my Inbox and routed instead to a Suspect Mailbox. Instead of
cluttering my Inbox and requiring me to sift through the junk, I could
look at the Suspect Mailbox when I chose to and decide which e-mails
to move to my Inbox and which to delete. Does Thunderbird have that
capability, to keep e-mails not from known senders in my Address Book
out of my Inbox?

[Steve]

If you create a filter with the criteria 'From' + 'isn't in my address
book' + specify the address book, you can set the Action to move the
messages to another folder, or tag them with a pre-defined
tag.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_(Thunderbird)

[Mike Easter]

I am familiar with EL's high spam blocker which puts only whitelisted
mail into the inbox and EL-recognized spam in the spam folder and
everything else into Suspect. Its default setting also sends challenges
to the suspect From, which is a very bad idea, but that challenge system
can be turned off and the suspect folder managed sanely.

If I had a mail account which would benefit from such a whitelist +
suspect system and my operating system were windows and my mail agent
were Tb, I would probably use SpamPal as a proxy because it has an
excellent whitelist capability.

SpamPal was designed to be a very powerful and flexible blocklist agent,
with additional plugins for those who like such as Bayesian and regular
expression derived filters, but any part of its functions can be turned
off and/or configured.

The concept of a proxy like SP is that the mail which is coming from
your provider's server passes thru' the SP proxy where it is 'combed'
for the characteristic traits it is configured for, in this case its
whitelist of your contacts which go to the Tb inbox.

You could use it with a spam folder and a suspect folder, like EL's
system, except that the spam identification would be done by SP and
subject tagged as spam and a simple Tb filter for spam subject would
divert the SP-id/ed spam to the spam folder.

Everything which was not whitelisted (inbox) and not SP-spam (spam
folder) would be suspect folder.


--
Mike Easter

[ku...@comcast.net]

Thank you, to both guys who replied. Mike, I have been a little bit reluctant to add another bit of third party software to my system. A multi-function anti-virus+ program and a computer "cleaner" called CCleaner. In my experience, as you start to add these utility-programs for lack of a better word, they start to trip over each other. From another source, somebody suggested Mail Washer. It's probably a competitor of SpamPal that you suggested. What do you think of just having too many such programs loaded and the likelihood of conflicts?

Thanks again,
Kurt

[Bruce Hagen]

<ku...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:13602441.125.1336012835120.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@ynff7...

On Sunday, April 29, 2012 11:02:14 PM UTC-5, Mike Easter wrote:
> Kurt Kramer wrote:
> > I have left Mindspring/Earthlink as my ISP. They DID have a good e-
> > mail application though. What I liked about it was this: Unless an e-
> > mail was from a sender saved in my Address Book, the e-mail was kept
> > out of my Inbox and routed instead to a Suspect Mailbox. Instead of
> > cluttering my Inbox and requiring me to sift through the junk, I could
> > look at the Suspect Mailbox when I chose to and decide which e-mails
> > to move to my Inbox and which to delete. Does Thunderbird have that
> > capability, to keep e-mails not from known senders in my Address Book
> > out of my Inbox?

You could use a message rule where if the message is not from someone in
your address book, move it to a folder you create.
--
~Bruce Hagen