705144 - New SPAM filtering behavior

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Nathan Champaigne]

The following is my e-letter to the White House Re: BIASED SPAM filter behavior:
Topic: Political Sabotage of your e-letter sent by Carol Browner, The White House." Firstly, I use Thunderbird, the public supported open 

source email client software. I recieve email updates from Carol regularly, TKS. However, my Thunderbird email package flags it as JUNK, or 

DANGEROUS email. I am pretty certain this is on purpose and by design, and not by accident. Thunderbird just started this flagging behavior 

recently, and did not do this when I first started recieving your correspondence. It continues to flag Whitehouse correspondence as a SCAM, 

even though I click to accept it. This means that the learning behavior of the email application is overriden by some extra code. When an email 

is redesignated as accepted, each subsequent correspodence from the same sender should be accepted. This extra code has to be telling the 

software to constantly warn recipients of some nafarious nature of incoming White House email. This strange behavior can not happen by 

accident. Thunderbird autmatically updates. It is during these sessions that the nafarious code that blocks Carol Browners message can be 

picked up directly from the Thunderbird server. This means that the Thunderbird volunteer network of developers has been infiltrated with 

Republican-leaning hackers. I give this a 9 out of 10 on the scale of possibility. If I am correct in my assumption, many elderly or 

less-technical-savy persons may reject the delivery.

Comment 1

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

This is not a security-sensitive bug that needs to be hidden from the public.

It is also not valid, but you don't have to take my word for it, our code is all publicly auditable and open source, as you note. I'll let the Thunderbird team decide what the correct disposition of this bug is (the concern about subsequent messages from the same sender being flagged sounds legitimate to me, though I suspect it's a dupe of another bug, and I freely acknowledge that I lack context on the algorithm used.)

On this thanksgiving day, I would implore you not to attribute malice to a group of people who build open source software and give it away purely because they want to make the internet a better place. Indeed many of us, myself included, are not US-based and have no particular interest in Democrat vs. Republican polemic. Much more to the point, though, we are good people trying to do good things for the world.

I appreciate you filing the bug, I think it means you care. Still, I'm quite earnest inthe reality of the situation lies squarely in the 1 out of 10 in your scale of possibility.

Comment 2

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(In reply to Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath] from comment #1)
> I appreciate you filing the bug, I think it means you care. Still, I'm quite
> earnest inthe reality of the situation lies squarely in the 1 out of 10 in
> your scale of possibility.

Fat fingers. That should read:

I appreciate you filing the bug, I think it means you care. Still, I'm quite earnest in the assertion that reality of the situation lies squarely in the 1 out of 10 in your scale of possibility.

Comment 3

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Nathan,

Thunderbird will flag emails as potential scams if they contain urls or images that use IP addresses instead of domain names since that is a typical feature of scam emails. The full logic for how we determine if we think an email is a scam can be found in http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/suite/mailnews/phishingDetector.js .

As for whether we think an email is Junk depends a great deal on how you have trained your instance of Thunderbird to recognize Junk emails. If you aren't careful you can accidentally poison your instance of Thunderbird to think common words are indicators of Junk. You can re-train Thunderbird by telling it that emails it thinks are Junk are not in fact Junk. Overtime, it will do a better job, but as in anything it isn't and won't be perfect.

If you want to attach one of the offending emails, we can tell you with more certainty why Thunderbird is behaving as it is.

Please be absolutely clear however that we don't exhibit political bias in the determination of Junk or Scam status of emails.

Comment 4

[Andre Klapper]

Conspiracy and hacker theories aside, the way more likely thing is that your spam filter simply identified a so-called 'false positive'. This is unpleasant but can unfortunately happen for various reasons described here already.
I don't see a valid bug in the code of Thunderbird mentioned in this report, but rather in user-generated spam indication training in combination with heuristic methods. Hence closing as INVALID, but as offered in comment 3 feel free to attach one of the offending emails so people can help you further with fixing this misbehavior.