Eric Shubert wrote: > P.S. Anyone else using DSPAM? I set up DSPAM and have it running, but I haven't had much luck with it.
I have a vague memory of seeing someone claim that you could train DSPAM using only 'spam' samples (no 'ham'), so I fed it my entire spam archive for the month, with only a very small number of 'ham' examples. Afterwards, DSPAM decided that all email was spam. (Granted, that probably gives it a false-positive rate of about 3%, but still). I then blew away its databases and tried to train it more selectively, letting it rate everything and forcing it to re-learn (as Spam) any messages that it had wrongly classified as Innocent. Unfortunately, I never seemed to be able to even "move the needle": feeding numerous samples of a highly-recognizable type of spam only reduced DSPAM's confidence that they were Innocent, but it never seemed to tip over into considering them Spam. I think the best that I ever got was a verdict that some particularly flagrant piece of spam was only Innocent with 60% probability. I should work out a more intelligent training regime and see if I can't get it to behave as advertised, but for me it certainly hasn't been the 'out-of-the-box' spam-recognizing miracle that it has been for some people. Angus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
