Date: 06/30/07 (Mozilla)    Keywords: web, linux, spam

I recently switched from XP to Ubuntu Linux, and with it switched from IE7 and Windows Live Mail Desktop to Firefox and Thunderbird. Firefox is fine, but I am not exactly impressed with Thunderbird so far.

My main email accounts are a pop3 one and a Hotmail account, so I downloaded the Webmail extension for Thunderbird, and it appears to be working fine, even if actually getting the right version of Thunderbird for it was a complete pain in the neck. (To explain, Webmail uses TB version 2, and Ubuntu's repositories only had 1.5.12. If you download the new version from Mozilla, it doesn't overwrite the older version despite what Mozilla says - it will run alongside it, ignoring all of your settings and refusing to import mail, so I had to do that manually.) My biggest problem with it at the moment is the way it deals with spam emails. I've been training it by giving it plenty of junk daily for the last three or so weeks, but it's only catching perhaps 60% of it, and at the same time is catching some legitimate emails. These aren't clever spams it's missing; the one I just marked as spam and moved was entitled "Would you like to show your partner/s your sexual strength and power?". Additionally, when it does catch it, if it's sent to my pop3 account it doesn't move it to the Junk folder like it's set up to. It moves junk from Hotmail easily, though.

Is there any way I can make it better, short of writing message filters myself to move things to Junk automatically? On Windows, WLM caught about 95% of spam and didn't keep putting real emails in Junk, and given how much praise there is for Thunderbird's spam filters I didn't expect them to be this unreliable. I've also found that I can't reply to Livejournal comments via Thunderbird, but seem to remember this was already a problem ages ago when I tried using Thunderbird for Windows, so I assume there isn't a workaround?

Firefox has been a much easier switch, but there are two features I'm missing from IE7. Is there any way to do the following?
- set it up to prompt you on a per-domain basis to accept/reject cookies - it seems as if I can't do it from a dialog when I visit new sites like I did with IE, and have to produce a list of either blocked or allowed sites manually. Or, can I import IE's list of domains to reject cookies from? I don't want to have to keep clearing cookies manually.
- make new tabs open my homepage by default rather than a blank page.

Thanks for any help you can give me :)

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/mozilla/391017.html