Ask Leo! #579 – 2015 in Review, Fixing the Recycle Bin, Downloading a File, and more…

Bud,

What you might be missing is that you have to train the spam filters to get better results. If you don't train it spam detection will be based on its experience with other users. You however, might consider some things as spam which few other do and it will not be tagged as spam unless you train it to your particular preferences.

I use Gmail and Thunderbird as my local client. I gave up on the TB spam filter because I didn't think it performed particularly well. When you download your mail to TB and notice some spam you have to go to your Gmail account using your browser, locate the offending spam mail in the All Mail section and mark it as spam. While you're there you should go to the spam section (Gmail doesn't have folders), check it for messages that aren't spam and mark them as not spam. If you choose to continue to use the TB spam filter you must train it also by marking messages in TB.

Over time you'll be adding the particular things that you, as opposed to all other Gmail users, consider spam. That will fine tune your Gmail spam filter to yield better results for you. Granted this is a little cumbersome when you use a local client like TB instead of reading your mail using your browser to access your Gmail account directly. My own experience using only Gmail spam filtering is that I get hardly any spam at all and very very few false positives.

Many folks recommend using TB with the IMAP protocol to access your Gmail account. This will make the contents of your account on Gmail and on TB the same; it will regularly sync the two. If you delete a message on TB it will be deleted on Gmail and vice versa. This is handy if you access your Gmail account from several devices as whatever you've done on one device will be reflected on all the other devices (messages only, not contacts).

Some of the commenters have mentioned using TB to back up their Gmail accounts on their local machine. This does work but I prefer to think of the back up process as the reverse of that. I think of the contents of my TB folders as the originals and the contents of the Gmail account as the back up. If I use the POP protocol (with proper settings) no messages in my Gmail account will be deleted unless I specifically go to the account using my browser and delete them. I periodically download new messages from my Gmail account to TB. As they come in I have several filters that sort them into folders for processing, generally based on how important they are. As I deal with each one I move it to a set of folders by category. Many are deleted at this point because they were not worth saving, like ads or minor missives from friends. These deletions are not reflected in the Gmail account because of the POP protocol.

This creates a set of only the important messages in TB that I can back up locally on my own machine with my usual daily back ups. Gmail still has those messages and all those I've deleted - just in case (maybe I deleted something I later regretted). It also means I am backing up only the important stuff so keeping the size of my back up smaller and quicker.

I keep my contacts in TB and do all my email sending from it using Gmail as my outgoing email server. By not keeping my contacts in my Gmail account they are not susceptible to being compromised if hacked. This will not work if you do a lot of sending of messages from several devices because you won't have the addresses available on each device unless you're willing to maintain a separate contacts list on each device.

Another advantage of using TB (or any local client) as the primary tool to read your emails is that you don't get any of the ads that Gmail normally adds to the page if you view them in your browser.

Also, I have a filter in my Gmail account that forwards nearly everything to another of my email accounts, with another company, that is used only for backing up the Gmail account. This is more to protect against the possibility that my Gmail account might someday be hacked and I would be locked out. Yes, I have set up all the recovery methods that Gmail offers but it's belt and suspenders for me.