Can you provide a link to the article?

When manually creating filters, you do usually have to enter the offending address by hand, though it's always better to copy-and-paste when possible. In most cases where an email address appears in Thunderbird, there will be an option, usually via a right click, to copy an email address to the clipboard.

Pazzer said

I have followed the instructions in the article Blocking a Sender but I can not get the Sender address into the Block List filter created. Do I have to type it in the field (having clicked on +) manually or if not how do I get it from the Sender field on the e-mail to the correct field in the Block List filter? It seems that the Message Filters is not actually on the Tools menu and when I click on that at the top of the Help I can not get the Sender address into the correct field. So perhaps somebody could say how (in detail) I do it? Have I missed something obvious?

Zenos,

           Thanks for that - I think that the link will find the article  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/blocking-sender
   The article appears to say that a right click on the Sender's address will enable a filter to be created but I do not seem to successful in getting the Spam blocked. Not obvious why to me at present. Also the article says that all the filters can be put in one file (Block List) but I don't seem to be successful with that either. So any help in simple detail would be welcome. I am a recent beginner with Thunderbird and find the lack of a simple blocking mechanism somewhat surprising since I am receiving much more Spam than I did with OE.

Pazzer

Where (in what window or list) are you doing the right-click?

Maybe this article on filters will be useful background.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/thunderbird/filters/

In general, filters are not an efficient way to deal with spam. A filter that "blocks" one particular sender may in fact only be useful once.

Try marking your unwanted email as "Junk".

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages

The right-click will create one filter that detects one particular sender. The idea of adding further senders to it to create a Block List requires that you open and edit the filter. In this case you do need to copy and paste the sender's address into the filter. And set it to "Match any of the following."

Thank you for that. The right click is on the senders address in the spam e-mail so that a filter can be created (as per the article I mentioned) but as you rightly say this is for only one sender which is not very efficient. I have been marking the spam as junk but was not able to determine what benefit that was in deleting the spam before I looked at the Inbox but I will look at the two links you gave and see what help they give. Thank you for your patience. Are there any plans to improve the system and provide the simple blocking which seemed to be effective on OE?

The simple blocking you so desire is inefficient and ultimately a total waste of time.

Sure if you want to block your old girlfriend and her mother, they are unlikely to change the email address they send from. Spam however rarely originates from the same email address twice. So blocking the email address is hardly beneficial.

There is a third style of unwanted mail that mostly US residents refer to as SPAM. This is subscribed commercial email sent under the US canspam act which is basically useless legislation. This is not spam, it is poor government regulation. Voting and lobbying congressmen is the solution, not block lists.

I understand the logic of your points but I did not have any spam with OE so that was somehow getting over the problem. Are we now saying that there is nothing we can efficiently do on Tbird which will stop the stuff getting to me or at least be deleted before I see it? Assuming that it does get to appear on the screen, what is the best way you would recommend of getting rid of it? My definition of spam would be mail which I have not requested, being sent to me by companies I do not know and trust and which I have had no contact with prior to their spam appearing. It is comparable to advertising being put through my letter box again without my asking and is truly junk. You will probably have seen from other posts about it that I have bee trying to establish that I was not missing something obvious in using the information which was already available and although the posts have been helpful I have not really progressed and my first task on opening Tbird is to get rid of the spam before I can see what I really need to see! I would like to avoid that task if at all practicable.

When did you last use OE? It's an obsolete, unmaintained email client that died with XP, which itself is now not supported.

My point being that it's pretty hard to look at OE now and gauge how it worked and how well it worked. I can't believe that a simple address "block" filter could be as effective as you seem to recall. Maybe your ISP/email provider was running an effective anti-spam service.

I mark all spam/UCE as Junk. I'm quite happy to manually re-mark as Junk to reinforce the automated categorization. A lot of my junk is automatically moved to the Junk Folder, and I use Saved Searches to coalesce all the various Junk folders into one virtual folder to make dealing with it (usually passing it on to Knujon) easy. Thinking about it, the "sending on to Knujon", using the Habul add-on, is possibly what makes it easy here, as doing this also deletes the Junk messages.

Having said that, Thunderbird is equipped with reasonably efficient filters that can manage your messagess, moving them to folders, tagging etc along with the "blocking" function. And the "block lists" it uses are YOURS, visible and accessible to YOU. I don't recall how OE managed blocked addresses. Was it easy or possible to remove an item from its blocklist? And with TB's filters, you can block, if you must, on a wide variety of parameters; sender, subject line, body text, and pretty much any of the header fields. (I have tried filtering junk in the past; it's surprising just how quickly a particular filter becomes obsolete.) If anyone is helping you out by labelling spam then another filter can add a Junk marking to it.

I'd suggest to you that you sort on the Junk column in the thread list pane. Then all the stuff marked as Junk will be gathered at either the top or bottom of the display, where a shift+click selection will let you delete them all in one pop.

Another approach would be a Saved Search across all of your folders, which collates all your junk into one virtual folder. Then a ctrl+a and del will zap them very efficiently.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-saved-searches

Thanks very much for that. I'll have to go away and digest it all!! As for the OE bit - I last used it about 2 months ago when I changed to Windows 8.1 and decided to use T'bird, it had worked well until then even though it was (to say the least) old and I very rarely had spam. I have not changed my ISP and did not think about what they might be providing so I will find out about that as I suppose that it could have changed with the new 8.1.

     Thanks again for all your help.

Ah, no, I doubt it. Your ISP doesn't/shouldn't care what OS you use.

But maybe you had some additional spam/malware/firewall software on the older computer that isn't there on the new one?