On 17/2/05 8:00 am, "Barry Wainwright" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 17/2/05 3:21 am, "Eddie Hargreaves" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On 2/16/05 12:23 PM, Allen Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> The "untrainable" nature of the filter may seem restrictive or >>> short-sighted, but actually it makes sense. If I as an individual >>> train my filter, I will always be getting newly spawned spam that >>> sneaks past the filter. Microsoft's crew, on the other hand, is >>> sieving the Internet deliberately looking for spam and updating the >>> filter to prevent it from ever reaching me. I might sift through >>> hundreds of spams, but they will process and prohibit thousands. The >>> only drawback I can see is that my filter gets updated every few >>> months instead of every day. >> >> The Junk Mail Filter in Entourage 2004 has been updated once (in January >> 2005) since its release on May 19, 2004. For those that prefer to receive >> the same spam for eight months straight, that might be fine. I prefer to not >> receive the spam that Entourage misses, and SpamSieve is my solution. >> Checking SpamSieve's statistics, I can see that it has captured 382 spam >> messages since 1/1/05 that Entourage missed, despite the Junk E-Mail Filter >> being set to High. During that same time, SpamSieve has only missed 3. >> That's not what I'd call "always getting newly spawned spam." Due to the >> disparities in those two stats, I fail to see how Entourage's non-trainable >> nature makes sense. >> >> Eddie Hargreaves >> > > Not my experience at all. I'm currently getting about 120 spam messages per > day across 5 accounts (and 3 of those accounts have server side filtering > carried out by the ISP). With the entourage JMF set on high, I get maybe one > or two per week missed by the filter. When I tried SpamSeive (admittedly, > before E2004 came out) I was getting more misses than that, maybe 3-4 per > day. > > However, of far higher importance to me is the false positives. I currently > get virtually no false positives at all (I can only remember one in the last > 3 months or so). Spamseive was catching more legitimate mail, even after > weeks of 'training'. Missing that one piece of legitimate mail is hugely > more hassle than dealing with the occasional spam in the inbox. > > I admit I am a heavy user of rules & MLM entries to sieve out a lot of the > legit mail from the JMF, but even so, Spamseive cannot compete with the > built in JMF for me. While on the subject of zealous content filtering, this last message from me got a notification from a subscriber to the list at directpartners.com that the message was rejected for "containing prohibited content". Hard to see what, in the message quoted above, could be construed as prohibited content. Herein lies one of the problems of 'trainable filters'. They can make mistakes. Depending on the user to feed the right sort of messages to a trainable filter will undoubtedly result in sub-optimal performance because users (as a general group) are not particularly familiar with the way that Bayesian filters work, and with what will and won't have a significant effect. -- Barry Wainwright Microsoft MVP (see http://mvp.support.microsoft.com for details) Seen the All-New Entourage Help Pages? - Check them out: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/> -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
