Apple Mail vs. Thunderbird

The past week was spent seeing how well Apple Mail and Thunderbird (Mac) handled junk mail. Both clients received the same email sent by my forwarder. Neither received any direct spam. Apple Mail flagged 371 out of 408 emails as Spam for a 91% success rate. There weren’t any false positives. Thunderbird trailed Apple Mail with a success rate of 83%. It caught 337 out of 408. Like Apple Mail, there weren’t any false positives. This was down from 90% last week. As for the spam destinations, my tier 1 “people only” address gets 43% of my spam while my tier 3 “spam magnet” gets 53%. Since I’ve been tracking, Apple Mail has had a 92% success rate while Thunderbird has had a 86% success rate. So, at least for the spam I’m receiving, Apple Mail is intercepting more of it than Thunderbird is. With the end of the year rush rush coming on I’ll be keeping it simple. I’ll be setting up three AOL email addresses to see how their three levels of Spam protection differ. I’ll just let the mail accumulate and do some counts in a week or or so.