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Thunderbird stores its mails in a kind of mbox file. The beginning of a mail is marked by a line starting with From , e. g. "From" and a space in the beginning of the line.

Until August 7th these lines looked like this:

From - Wed Aug 7 14:45:02 2024

(The hyphen between "From" and the date replaces the sender address.)

At August 8th Thunderbird updated itself. Afterwards these lines look like this:

From

(Just "From" and a space.)

My problem is, that I use a special Thunderbird mailbox to collect spam mails. This special mailbox is used to train SpamAssassin. Until August 7th SpamAssassin accepted the mails from the Thunderbird mailbox after some minor cleanups. Starting from August 8th SpamAssassin does not recognize the mails in the Thunderbird mailbox any more.

However, after adding a hyphen and a date (any date!) to the truncated From lines SpamAssassin recognizes the mails again.

Does anybody know why the From lines are truncated by recent versions of Thunderbird? Is there any way to return to the old behaviour within Thunderbird? Or is it possible to teach SpamAssassin to accept the truncated From lines from current Thunderbird versions?

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
Dieter
  • 31

1 Answers1

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By now, Thunderbird updated to version 128.4.2esr and writes the From lines again as in the older versions. To tell the truth, I don't know in which version exactly the old behaviour was reintroduced, because in the meantime I helped myself and expanded the script handling the mailboxes by a line reintroducing the date to the From lines (if missing).

The relevant code is:

sed -E "s/^From (\r)?$/From - `date +"%a %b %e %T %Y"`\1/" $MBOX_IN > $MBOX_OUT

accompanied with some file handling.

Dieter
  • 31