[SWLUG] spam filtering in Thunderbird, tips?

[swlug]

I'm using TB2 on Ubuntu9.10 (with KDE 4.3).

Thunderbirds spam filtering is rubbish. I did a test and found that 10 
minutes of training of the Opera spam filter beats TB hands down - I 
have tried restarting the training from scratch in TB but it hasn't 
helped. I don't really like Opera as MUA otherwise I'd switch, also I 
don't want to have to move my Mrs over to a new app unless it's a 
critical switch.

I've looked at add-ons but there's slim pickings, one SpamBayes 
front-end ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4025 ) 
looks good but is unsupported and seems problematic to install and 
temperamental in operation. I need it to work without sucking up as much 
time as manual spam filtering would.

Any suggestions, anyone here using TB got a solution that works without 
too much tweaking?

I don't want to route al mail via Gmail or the like either.

Thanks for any ideas.