A comment I hear quite often is “my spam filter is really good, so I only check the spam-folder once a week or so”. What´s the point of having a spam-filter, when you´re still looking through all those unwanted emails? Sure, you don´t do that every day, but then it just means in a week´s time there will be even more spam e-mails to browse through. But to be honest, I was the same. Once a week I´d quickly scan through thousands of new e-mails in my spam folder. That was quite annoying and at the speed I was doing it, I probably missed a few e-mails which clearly weren´t spam. As you can see, it was pretty pointless. But they are still out there: E-mail users who are happy, because they have such a good spam filter, so they only have to go through their spam folder “briefly” every now and then.

A few months ago I decided not to look at my spam folder anymore. From that point on I tried to improve the reliability of my spam filters more and more. In the Thunderbird spam-filter there are not that many settings but with the right training you can minimize the error rate to a decent level. Some important e-mails still find their way into the spam-folder, so I thought about what I could do to filter out those important e-mails as easy as possilbe. That is when I discovered the Saved Search feature in Thunderbird. This feature has been in there since version 1.0, but I never really thought about using it. I don´t want to discuss every detail here of how Saved Search works. If you want to know more about it I recommend this page here. Saved Search basically allows you to save your search as a virtual folder. In this folder it automatically displays only the messages which match the criterias you´ve defined earlier. This is how I set up my spam-search-folder:

First, open the Search Messages window in Thunderbird by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F. Then you select your spam-folder in the drop-down-menu at the top. Now try to think of some real e-mails that got caught in your spam-folder. Do they have certain characteristics, like sender address, a certain word in the subject line? If yes, just enter them as a search criteria. In the screenshot below you can see some examples from my spam-search-folder. I get a lot of e-mails from New Zealand, so I added “.co.nz”. The other two filters are checking the subject line for “alex3d.de” and “twitter” because I missed a few important e-mails recently which matched those criterias.

When you´re done here, just click on “Save as Search Folder” at the bottom right. In the next screen you can name the virtual folder, move it into the right place and you´re done. The new folder should now appear in the Thunderbird folders pane on the left. When you click on it, it will display only the e-mails in your spam-folder which match the criterias you´ve defined earlier. I´m constantly adding new search criterias to my “Spamsearch” folder. For that you just need to right-click on the folder and select Properties.

Every day, when I´m done with my regular e-mails, I click on the “Spamsearch” folder and it only shows me a few e-mails which could be relevant as opposed hundreds or thousands like before.

You could say now that a similar result could be archived with a properly maintained black and white list, but if your e-mail provider doesn´t have something like that or you don´t even know what it is, why not just use the built-in Thunderbird features like Saved Search? If you have any comments, feedback or improvements, please let me know.