Ignoring spam

I was going to fix my Thunderbird email for some time to allow for specific messages in alerts. It isn't available stock in T-bird AFAIK. So I did crontab -e and created a script that checked the data in the Thunderbird directory every 10 minutes and used espeak and wav files to indicate who emailed and also put an image on the screen using imagemagick ( display) so that even if I miss the audio message, their picture would be there on the screen until I exited that process. Since I have filters for the mail of interest, the rest just mainly gets ignored. I got tired of looking at mail when some spam came in and so it only talks to me when it is mail from the list of people that I -want- to hear from.