Plaidophile: Thunderbird's "email scam" detector sucks

October 21, 2008

Thunderbird's "email scam" detector sucks (geekery)

by fluffy at 10:48 AM

Here is what Thunderbird thinks of my inbox:

Registration confirmation from MWSF: a scam
Weekly newsletter from SFBC: a scam
"You have an eCard" linking directly to a .exe file: not a scam
"Account verification" email purportedly from a bank I'd never heard of: not a scam
Nigerian fund account transfer manager "job" offer: not a scam

Comments

#11412

10/21/2008 11:39 am

Email from Japanese coworker who is in my address book and from who I've received hundreds of emails from in the last year: probably a scam.

#11414 10/21/2008 03:02 pm

It is open source, why shouldn't the spammers go in and fiddle with the rules a little?

#11416

10/22/2008 04:48 pm

And everything from Barack Obama's campaign: a scam.

#11558 12/13/2008 09:07 pm

I believe Thunderbird's scam detector is only checking to see if links in the email lead to the same domain that the email came from. There's no logic other than that - it's a really really simple phishing detection, that's it. The implementation makes it appear as though it's doing some real work on figuring out scams, but its not. I think.

#11559

12/13/2008 09:11 pm

I think it's more like it looks at the link text and link attribute of every link, and if there's any links which look like a URL but link anywhere else (like with a clickthrough tracking wrapper, which is extremely common) it marks it a scam.