It has driven me (and quite a few others) nuts for some time now: New mail comes in that is junk or filtered as spam and the new mail alert sound still plays. Who wants to be notified of incoming junk? Nobody.
I’ve looked but can’t find the Thunderbird bug report where I added my “I hate this too!” comment a few months ago, but I’m pleased to report that I’ve found a workaround.
Your specific mail filtering details will likely differ from mine, but the basic idea should be the same. For the sake of following what is below, here’s how I filter my mail.
- On my mail server I use Spamassassin which scores messages and inserts various message header lines before delivering them to you. One of these header lines is
X-Spam-Flag:with a value of either YES or NO. - In Thunderbird, I filter “all messages with a X-Spam-Flag YES” into a folder called Spam. Traditionally this has caused a new mail alert (in my case sound).
The solution:
- Edit the existing filter mentioned above.
- In addition to the action for filing the message into the Spam folder, add another action for “Mark As Read”
That’s it! Bear in mind that you will no longer see a “new message count” next to the folder you’re filing into. That is, Spam will end up in the Spam folder but you’ll have no notice that there are messages in there until you select and view the contents of the folder.
