Closed Bug 1612818 Opened 5 years ago Closed 5 years ago

"This message may be a scam" warning should include details

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: php4fan, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.130 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I opened a message and this warning was displayed at the top:

"This message may be a scam"

which of course was a false positive.

Actual results:

There is a "x" button to dismiss the warning and a "Preferences" button which in turn unfolds two options: ignore warning for this message, or edit scam detection preferences.

There is, however, no "Details" option that will tell me EXACTLY WHY Thunderbird thinks this message is a scam

Expected results:

There should be a "Details" option or something like that, that will tell me EXACTLY WHAT scam detection criteria the message matches, explained in understandable language. It's OBVIOUS that if you tell me that you think a message may be a scam you should also tell me why you think that. Also, how am I supposed to adjust my scam detection preferences (for example, to avoid this false positive in the future) if I don't even know what in this message was detected as suspicious?

It's unbelievable that I have to tell you this.

Please upgrade. in 68 this works differently, and for the usual case (mis-matching links) it will become obvious to you why.
For other cases, such as linking to numeric IPs and using forms, it's far to technical for end users to describe.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 5 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX

Please upgrade

I'd be happy to. I have a currently supported TLS Ubuntu version (16.04) with automatic software updates enabled, so I'm as appalled as you are to see that I have such an outdated version of Thunderbird.

For other cases, such as linking to numeric IPs and using forms, it's far to technical for end users to describe

Too technical "for end users"? Am I not an end user? Aren't you? Is Thunderbird intended to be user exclusively by people that are not capable of understanding that?

It's never too technical to give the end user an OPTION to go get more information if they want to. Like a "details" or "Learn more" link.
Note that I'm not talking about a generic link to an explanation of how scam detection works, but information about what specific criteria has triggered the warning for a given message.

When I get a "this may be a scam" warning on a notification email from Amazon, I want to know whether Amazon is doing something stupid with their notification emails or, more likely, what is wrong with the scam detection, because I want to be able to report that either to them or to you.

Because having too many false positives is exactly as bad as failing to detect true positives or having no detection at all.

16.04 is not the latest LTS release for ubuntu. Even so, like I said it's already fixed (for the relevant part). You just need to get the newest version.

If your distribution does not provide packages for the latest release of Thunderbird, you could try to manually download Linux binaries provided by the Thunderbird project.

Have a look at the following page, go to section
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-thunderbird-linux#w_installing-outside-of-a-package-manager

(The link to help.ubuntu.com seems very old, not sure if that still works. Try the steps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. directly on that page.)

Duplicate of this bug: 1893195
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