After one month of using it, I’m very happy to confirm that SpamBayes (via the ThunderBayes plug-in for Thunderbird) is absolutely as awesome as I’d heard it could be!

The scoring is so accurate that I decided a while back to let it automatically delete messages with 100% spam probability as read, so that I didn’t have to look at them at all — that’s the majority of the spam I get. Anything with a lesser spam probability, or anything it’s uncertain about, is moved to a junk folder but is left unread; I look it over to confirm that it’s really spam before getting rid of it.

The statistics for the last two weeks: the majority (83%) of spam messages I received scored 100 and were auto-deleted. 11% of spam messages scored over 90 and were marked as spam and left for my confirmation, and the remaining 6% were marked uncertain. And there were no false positives, or even false negatives.

It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than anything else I’ve used. 🙂