Email can be a problem, especially when you have an account that gets a lot of spam and junk mail. Sometimes it’s easy to just create a new account and tell your contacts about your new email, but other times you really need to continue using that email account. The only way to do that when you’re getting hundreds of spam and junk mail a day is to use filters.

Thunderbird is a free, open source email client. One feature that Thunderbird has is email filtering. This allows you to set some parameters and the program will follow them and do exactly what you tell it to do.

Go to Tools and then Message Filters to bring up the options. Start a new filter to get started. You basically have a couple of options. If the conditions of the upper section are met, it will do what you want in the lower section. For example, if you get the word Mercury in the body of an email, you can set a filter to go to your spam folder or anywhere else in your account. This can be set for words in the subject line, body, email accounts, and many other options giving you full control.

If you have an account where you’re getting twenty pieces of junk for every real email, it might be time to start filtering the messages you want as well. Set up a filter so that certain email addresses go to a certain folder. This way you can filter what you want and you won’t have to deal with spam and junk as much, making your email a bit easier to use.

If you get creative, it can get to the point where even a spam account that receives hundreds of spam messages a day is still usable in Thunderbird with the proper filters.