Did you read my writeup on ThunderBayes 0.2 [0]? It explains how to setup ThunderBayes to get it working with SpamBayes and Thunderbird. Send me an email if you have more questions (my email address can be found at the top of the About Me [1] page on this blog). I’m closing comments now because I’m getting too much comment spam.

Also, you might want to consider upgrading your Thunderbird to 2.0–there are a few features in ThunderBayes that only work with the newer version.

~ Daniel

[0] http://pieces.openpolitics.com/2007/03/thunderbayes-02/#more

[1] http://pieces.openpolitics.com/about/

I am interested in knowing how to use Thunderbird with a HTTP proxy. Is there a write-up about this anywhere? Can it be done? I have installed SPAMbayes and Thunderbayes and am running Thunderbird 1.5.0.12, and now I can’t really figure out what to do next.

Any words of advice would be appreciated.

I found ThunderBayes on the Thunderbird addons site and it made me curious, as I hadn’t heard of SpamBayes before. I’m now using it on my home computer running Gentoo Linux, and I’m glad to say it works almost perfectly!

One problem I am seeing with the extension is that when a message is marked as spam/ham with the toolbar button, it seems to send a duplicate message to SpamBayes; SpamBayes doesn’t look up the existing message. The problem with that, of course, is that the Review page doesn’t update – I need to tell SpamBayes to discard the ones I’ve already done (fortunately not too hard since I classify all the Unsure ones and the spammy ones that SpamBayes thought were Ham with ThunderBayes first, so it’s easy to know which ones to discard).

It also means that the SpamBayes statistics on false negatives/positives stay at 0, since it works on a duplicate copy of the message. Also, if I rate the same message twice it’ll still count the second rating.

I’m using SpamBayes 1.0.4 and ThunderBayes 0.2.2. Any ideas? Or is it a ThunderBayes problem?

There should be a “Spam” button in the main toolbar customization palette (right-click the main Thunderbird toolbar and select “Customize…”). The icon is an envelope with a red circle with a slash through it (what is that symbol called anyway?). Once you have SpamBayes configured this button will allow you to train SpamBayes from within Thunderbird.

If you’re using Thunderbird 2.0 there are also two new columns that can be added to the main message list view in Thunderbird – Spam Status and Spam Probability (click the righ-most column header to see all available columns).

Hope that helps.

Here are a few other improvements I’d suggest for ThunderBayes:

- The option to take over Thunderbird’s built-in Junk-related keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ‘J’ to mark the current message as Spam).

- When marking a message as spam moves it to another folder, select the next message in the current folder automatically in the same way as Thunderbird’s built-in message-moving commands.

- Fix the toolbar button so that it lines up with the other toolbar buttons in Thunderbird 2.0 (currently it appears shifted upward from where it should be).

Thanks again for your hard work on this extension. It’s finally allowed me to make the move from Microsoft Outlook with CloudMark Desktop.