Re: Is Bayes Dead? Have the spammers won?

[Kris Deugau]

John D. Hardin wrote:
I've never trusted automatic learning. Why let your Bayes database be 
(even partially) under the control of a third party, particularly 
when that third party is the attacker?

Because there's no other (practical and/or ethical) way of getting 
enough ham to make it useful?

Anyone using SA in an ISP environment will run into this problem;  about 
the only way I can see to legitimately get any real volume of ham is to 
send customers' outbound mail into a learning queue somewhere.  Even 
that has its limits and issues - for instance, the fact that any ISP 
larger than a few thousand customers will likely have completely 
separate paths for inbound and outbound mail, which *will* affect the 
usefulness of the learning.  :/

I've been running the same Bayes databases on one system and my personal 
email since I upgraded from SA2.44 to 2.54 and started using Bayes;  I'd 
be running the original Bayes DB on another system if I had figured out 
I *could* just continue to use the exact same files upgrading 
2.64->3.1.7 at the time.

Accuracy on the continuous-use databases hasn't suffered for the 
autolearning, so far as I can tell...  but the more out-of-date SA 
itself got the worse it was at tagging spam.

I *do* regularly feed back both my own missed-spams (my account, and 
three role accounts), as well as customer-submitted missed-spam.  Lately 
there have only been four or five (reported) FNs per day, across the 
whole system.

-kgd