It's pretty late, but I'm riled about Thunderbird. There are oh, so many annoyances that I just can't take it any more. I'm about ready to try anything.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking just anything that comes in as spam. The "adaptive filters" are a joke. I reset the filters, and in three days it's marking everything as spam. It can't tell the difference between incoming mail from mailing lists that I'm on and the ones that look like they're from a mailing list but are just an embedded gif advertising Vi4gr4.

I am tired of it ignoring the SpamAssassin headers that come from my email server even though I have toggled the option to honor them. These controls need to be more fine-grained. I should be able to say "Use SpamAssassin Rules ONLY" and have it do nothing but obey the SpamAssassin headers.

I am tired of having to retrieve email from the junk folder and manually figure out where it's supposed to go. When I toggle off the junk setting for a message when it's in the junk folder, Thunderbird should put the message back where it's supposed to be - in my inbox or one of the folders into which that email should be sorted.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking email that I have already sorted into the junk bin. I keep a folder with software and site registration details that have been emailed to me in IMAP. It's handy when I am on the road and need access to a service. One time, when Thunderbird was loading my IMAP folders on a new machine, it marked 3/4 of these messages as spam and moved them to the delete folder. I spent the rest of the day sorting my registration emails out from the regular spam that my mail server had correctly detected.

If I put it into a folder, it's off limits, Thunderbird. Ok?

When I mark a message as spam manually, it should move the message into the junk folder. I should be able to do this even if the automatic detection of spam is disabled. Check out the options in Thunderbird. You can set up the software to let you mark email manually as spam, but then it doesn't so anything automatically to it. It's just flagged as "spam". Useless?

I should also be able to tell thunderbird somehow, "Email is no longer welcome from this sender." This seems like a really simple thing to do. Right-click, select the Junk submenu "Add sender to blacklist". This submenu should also contain a few other options, like "Add destination to blacklist", since I would absolutely love to block email from my per-use throwaway addresses as soon as I discover they've been abused. And while you're at it, add a couple of easy whitelist options, too.

If a message is part of a thread that I have not already marked as junk, it's not junk, you stupid two-bit freeware program. Stop marking my mailing list messages as junk!

It's almost worth it to hand-filter the spam. The server does most of it, so it's no big deal. But there's enough that gets through to make it annoying that the junk controls don't work as well as they should.

Perhaps Eudora is the way to go. They're going open-source, did you know?