What is Bitdefender doing with my email?

Jaxom

Note: Selecting a category is required, but running my cursor over the options, many of them (including Antispam) couldn't be selected in my Firefox browser. I settled on the category Windows / Utilities, which I know is wrong, but is the closest I could come. This should be fixed.

Now for the actual subject of this post . . .

I have a new Bitdefender Total Security on Windows 11, and my email is Thunderbird.

A few times since installing Bitdefender, a brief message has appeared in the lower right - mostly covered over by Thunderbird's own messages of incoming emails - where a brief glimpse let me see that Bitdefender seemed to be identifying emails as bad in some way (spam?) that were from vendors I actually want to hear from.

But I don't know exactly what emails those were, or how to find out, or what (if anything) Bitdefender did with them, or how to stop it from doing anything else.

I didn't set Bitdefender up to check my email - I couldn't, since it's not Outlook or gmail - but it's doing it anyway, which would be fine if I could control it. I do have Antispam turned on, because that seemed like a good thing, and under Settings it lets me "manage friends" and "manage spammers", but both lists would be far to long for me to manage Bitdefender's spam filtering that way.

In fact, I don't even know if Antispam is what's operative here, and not some other Bitdefender protection. As I said, the messages are very brief and mostly covered up, then they disappear.

My email is already filtered by Spam Assassin, but it only diverts spam to my junk box - it doesn't delete it - and if it's in doubt it asks me. By contrast, I don't even know what, if anything, Bitdefender is doing with or to it.

Any insight on all that would be appreciated!

Jaxom

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Jaxom,

I think you might have tried to post in the archive section first. The Windows category is fine, since your post is about email protection and antispam, I'll go ahead and move it to Protection.

What you are experiencing could be caused by the Antispam module, or a combination of the spam filters and settings. I think the first step would be to switch it OFF and see how the emails arrive afterwards, and if those notifications persist. If you are also using SpamAssassin with Bitdefender Antispam enabled, then there's a good chance to encounter issues with your email. I think you simply need to choose one Antispam filter and stick with it.

Keep in mind that Bitdefender’s spam filter won’t work with:

• email accounts you access through a web browser
• email applications that use IMAP or Exchange instead of POP3/SMTP

If you use a web browser to check for emails or if your email application or email account does not support the POP3 protocol, Bitdefender can’t intercept spam. However, if you accidentally open an infected email attachment, Bitdefender will still protect your computer from cyber threats. In such cases, to avoid receiving unwanted spam emails, it’s recommended to use your email provider’s built-in spam filter. This feature can automatically detect and move spam emails to the Spam or Junk folder, keeping your inbox clean.

So, my advice would be to switch the Antispam filter OFF, also check the setup for SpamAssassin and keep in mind that most email providers also offer built-in spam filters that automatically detect and divert spam emails to a separate folder. Therefore, you could actually be running 3 antispam filters at once and this would most likely mess up your emails..

Regards,

Alex