[Spambayes] Is Equal Ham & Spam really the best?

[Brendon Whateley]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
>     Brendon> I've just started using spambayes again after a while away from
>     Brendon> it.  Now, 3 days in, I notice that I've trained on far more
>     Brendon> spam than ham.  (Total emails trained: Spam: *432* Ham: *64) I
>     Brendon> seem to remember that this was previously my experience in the
>     Brendon> past.
>
> Are you training on every message you receive or just the mistakes?  Most
>   
I just train on errors and some unsure.  At the moment, I'm getting
almost no ham in unsure.
> people generally only train on the mistakes and unsures.  Your ratio is
> about 7:1.  That's a bit high.  I'm maintaining about a 1:1 ratio, currently
>   
That is high relative to the conventional wisdom, but I'm questioning
the correctness of that wisdom.
> have about 120 each of ham and spam dating back to March (4+ months).  (I
>   
Perhaps I receive much more spam than you do! :) 
> Yes, I believe it was tested pretty thoroughly back in the day.
>   
I couldn't find any reference to such testing and don't remember any
from back when Tony and I were writing Spambayes the paper for CEAS.  If
anybody knows of some research, I'd love to see it.

Perhaps its time to re-evaluate that statement?

Brendon.