I must say I'm a tad confused by the settings for Junk. The option I see to move messages to the Junk folder appeasr to be associated with the manual setting of Junk status. I infer from this that messages automatically identified as Junk by the Junk Controls will be labelled as such but left in place.

I'm currently experiencing a lot of spam on one particular account, and so I've been trying some more aggressive filtering rather than sitting back and waiting for the Junk Controls to learn about it. So right now I have filters that move Junk messages to Junk for me, and also train the Junk Controls in doing so. This of course clouds my understanding of what the Junk Controls by themselves do when they identify Junk.

I also have a Saved Search Folder that aggregates all my Junk, so I tend not to need to care where it is actually located.

But you clearly believe that something has changed. Is it not set to delete Junk over a certain age. Or do you not periodically clear out the Junk folder by hand?

I have used Thunderbird from its inception. The option to move Junk the the Junk folder has always worked for those automatically marked Junk. I do have an automatic deletion after a certain number of days on the Junk folder which has always worked, but I did clean it all out to create space, if that was the problem.

@Zenos

Zenos said

I must say I'm a tad confused by the settings for Junk. The option I see to move messages to the Junk folder appeasr to be associated with the manual setting of Junk status. I infer from this that messages automatically identified as Junk by the Junk Controls will be labelled as such but left in place.

You have me confused Zenos. (But that is not hard these days)

I assume your referring to the global junk settings in options rather than the ones in account settings, which are the important ones.

These settings are obviously for automatic actions.

@dchoran

I have seen these things "just stop" when anti virus is locking files to scan them. Creating an exception in your anti virus for the folder or folders Thunderbird uses to store mail is the way around that.

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb#w_where-is-my-profile-stored

Given Thunderbird stores mail in a text format that is not executable, there is no reason for the anti virus to be scanning the files at all.

For a time, most In" mesages started to apear in a Junk folder, from which I had to rescue them; I made a filter for each (wandted) mesage, to make sure it did not get treated as junk. Now the opposite has happeded: even messages from a source I have "marked" as junk, several times, appear each day in the "In" folder, which is less serious, but a nuisance. It does not seem to "learn".# And the "Junk" folder shows as a sub-folder of a normal folder, (labelled: "John")!

  Now I'll try to create a new Junk folder.