The whole question of what to set the filtering parameters
for Certain Spam and Possible Spam is interesting. I believe that the real
trade-off is that SpamBayes needs a certain amount of training. Also, we
are living in an environment in which the generators of Spam are trying to get
through SpamBayes (among other filters) with some success. The good news
is that SpamBayes automatically adapts to new attempts to get through it, as
long as you keep training it on the new Spam (and any time it can't tell that a
real email is real).
The whole point is to make the Certain Spam folder really
be CERTAIN. This way you only need to look at it in a cursory manner in
order to determine that it really is certain. The Possible Spam folder is
really used to identify which emails are sufficiently questionable that
SpamBayes needs further training. Even so, having a possible Spam folder
that holds 90-99% spam is still a lot more productive that having this number of
emails in your regular inbox, because you are in "spam-detection" mode when
looking at the Possible Spam folder rather than being in "email-reading" mode as
when you look at your inbox.
Thus the default parameter for Possible Spam is 15% and the
default parameter for Certain Spam is 90%. You can play with these, but
you need a significant window between these two in order to get enough emails to
allow SpamBayes to adapt to changing spam attacks. I found it was not
difficult to get most of my good emails to have very low spam scores, so a very
low number on Possible Spam is good.
The best way to learn how to set these values is to display
the spam scores in Outlook. You can add the spam score column to your
outlook display of your inbox and your possible spam folder, and your certain
spam folder. This way you can quickly assess how to set these parameters
to minimize the possibility of getting a good email into Certain Spam and
getting spam in your inbox. Don't try to minimize the number of spams in
the Possible Spam folder, just keep the amount of spam here to a reasonably
large percentage of total spam so SpamBayes will be trained on new spam attack
methods.
Peter Bishop
Aeroprise, Inc.
Take advantage of the Aeroprise Enterprise Discovery and Personalization System for both Smart Clients and standard browsers available only with the Aeroprise Mobile Gateway.
Aeroprise, Inc.
Take advantage of the Aeroprise Enterprise Discovery and Personalization System for both Smart Clients and standard browsers available only with the Aeroprise Mobile Gateway.
On Behalf Of Matt Fischer
Subject: [Spambayes] cutoff settings
I want to change my cut-offs so that I have less Unsure and more Spam, as I get 10-20 Unsures per day and 99.999999% are Spam.
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