Mailman 3 November 2002 - SpamBayes

Outlook plugin - training
by Moore, Paul Dec. 3, 2003

Dec. 3, 2003

When the Outlook plugin filters mails, it classifies them as either spam or potential spam, and can put them in appropriate folders. In the spam/potential spam folders, there is a "Recover from Spam" button available, and in other folders there is a "Delete as spam" button. These buttons add the message to the training database as well as taking the appropriate action. One thing I don't see, however, is a means of confirming the classifier's decisions as correct. A "yes, that is spam" button for the spam folder, and a "yes, that's ham" button in non-spam folders. As I'm starting from a very small message base, I worry that correct classifications are still somewhat based on "luck", and training based on correct decisions would help to increase both my and the classifier's confidence level. I can do this by regular retraining, but that has 2 disadvantages: it's much clumsier than simply clicking on a "clever boy!" button, and it relies on me not deleting messages until I do a training run. Much of the ham I get is "read and forget", so I'd rather delete immediately. When I get a chance to dive into the code, I'll see how hard this would be to implement. Paul.

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RE: [Spambayes] Outlook plugin - training
by Piers Haken Dec. 3, 2003

Dec. 3, 2003

I don't believe you need this. I think that the classifier automatically trains on messages as they arrive (or at least on messages that it's sure about). You only need to retrain if it has made a mistake, or if it's unsure. Piers. > -----Original Message----- > From: Moore, Paul [mailto:Paul.Moore@atosorigin.com] > Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 2:09 AM > To: Spambayes (E-mail) > Subject: [Spambayes] Outlook plugin - training > > > When the Outlook plugin filters mails, it classifies them as > either spam or potential spam, and can put them in > appropriate folders. > > In the spam/potential spam folders, there is a "Recover from > Spam" button available, and in other folders there is a > "Delete as spam" button. These buttons add the message to the > training database as well as taking the appropriate action. > > One thing I don't see, however, is a means of confirming the > classifier's decisions as correct. A "yes, that is spam" > button for the spam folder, and a "yes, that's ham" button in > non-spam folders. > > As I'm starting from a very small message base, I worry that > correct classifications are still somewhat based on "luck", > and training based on correct decisions would help to > increase both my and the classifier's confidence level. > > I can do this by regular retraining, but that has 2 > disadvantages: it's much clumsier than simply clicking on a > "clever boy!" button, and it relies on me not deleting > messages until I do a training run. Much of the ham I get is > "read and forget", so I'd rather delete immediately. > > When I get a chance to dive into the code, I'll see how hard > this would be to implement. > > Paul. > > _______________________________________________ > Spambayes mailing list > Spambayes(a)python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes >

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Advantages of S?
by Gary Robinson April 26, 2003

April 26, 2003

At present, it appears that S may perform better than relatively untweaked graham (as I guess bogofilter is using), but about the same as tweaked graham as spambayes is using, but has the advantage of showing a spread of results. As I see it there are two possible advantages to the spread: 1) emails in the middle could be classified as "you should manually check these", or 2) the user could adjust for the level of sensitivity he wants (similar to what happens now in Entourage which is otherwise brain-dead as a spam filter). (1) is a attractive but one thing worries me: it may give people a false sense of security -- they may think they only have to look at the middle ones, but occasionally even extreme cases of seeming to be spam might be legit. On the other hand, on those rare occasions, the sender can always try again if he doesn't get a response! ;) Just a couple of thoughts. --Gary -- Gary Robinson CEO Transpose, LLC grobinson(a)transpose.com 207-942-3463 http://www.emergentmusic.com http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454

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Upgrade problem
by Just van Rossum Dec. 3, 2002

Dec. 3, 2002

Hi there, First off: I started playing with spambayes last sunday, and it's been a blast so far. I'm using pop3proxy.py, love the brand new web interface. However, I did a cvs up today, and unpickling the database stopped working, as classifier.Bayes became a classic class. After some twiddling I managed to repair it, but now I get AssertionErrors during training: [python:~/code/spambayes] just% ./hammie.py -g mymail/good.mbox.fix Training ham (mymail/good.mbox.fix): 4 Traceback (most recent call last): File "./hammie.py", line 483, in ? main() File "./hammie.py", line 460, in main h.update_probabilities() File "./hammie.py", line 336, in update_probabilities self.bayes.update_probabilities() File "classifier.py", line 327, in update_probabilities assert hamcount <= nham AssertionError Is my db screwed or is it repairable? Just

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RE: [Spambayes] don't update if you don't want to retrain
by Moore, Paul Dec. 1, 2002

Dec. 1, 2002

From: Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions > So... does this lay to rest forever the pickle/dbm debate? Is there any > reason left to use a pickle? Sorry, quite the opposite (IMHO). The patch switches to using shelve, which uses anydbm, which (still) uses the buggy BerkeleyDB 1.85 on Windows. So Windows users should probably still use pickles. Basically, you're never going to avoid the fact that Windows users don't have a reliable DBM implementation by default (unless you count dumbdbm). So you either use pickles, or ship/require some 3rd party solution. [Assuming that *in practice* the risk involved with the DBM 1.85 bugs is high enough to be worth worrying about - it's only a Python 2.2 issue, as 2.3 will have a newer DBM implementation included]. Paul.

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don't update if you don't want to retrain
by Neale Pickett Dec. 1, 2002

Dec. 1, 2002

I checked in the caching dbdict stuff. Because of changes to how things are stored, and the removal of the lame MetaInfo class, I had to up the pickle version. So don't update until you're ready to retrain. This scheme uses much less cruft, which should make Jeremy happy. It's certainly made me happy :) Neale

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Easy task for Outlook
by Mark Hammond Nov. 30, 2002

Nov. 30, 2002

Just incase someone is bored, and would like to contribute to the Outlook plugin, but don't think they can. Well, do I have the job for you <wink>. The plugin could do with some kind of "log file" strategy. Currently all "print" statements go to the win32traceutil package. However, once we package this up as a stand-alone DLL, this wont fly. Therefore, what I would like is code that does something reasonable with a log file, and redirects sys.stdout to this file. "Something reasonable" means somehow deleting old log messages. I dont care if we keep a different log per day automatically deleting old ones, or any other strategy that is both reasonable and not overkill. A new module would be perfect - then addin.py can import and use it when it detects it is frozen. No big deal, and not a huge job, but certainly should be fairly simple for anyone with reasonable Python skills, but no Windows or Outlook skills. Mark.

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Re: [Spambayes] fwd: robinson f(w) equation: X constant confusion
by jm＠jmason.org Nov. 28, 2002

Nov. 28, 2002

Tim Peters said: > Rob Hooft ran some downhill Simplex optimizations that also converged on X a > bit over 0.5, and S substantially smaller than we use by default (we use > 0.45 by default). > On three different sets of test data, I measured "the average" spamprob to > be a bit over 0.5 too (it ranged from 0.52 to 0.56). Interesting! > A difference is that the test data I used had about the same number of ham > as spam, while you've got a 1::2 ratio. Are you sure you weren't using 1000 > spam vs 2000 ham? If you were, and "the true unknown word" spamprob were > about 0.5, I'd expect you to measure one near 1/3, since there would be (to > a 0th-order approximation <wink>) about twice as many ham-word spamprobs > feeding into the computed average than there were spam-word spamprobs > feeding into it, and that would drag the average below 0.5 simply due to > having more of one kind of word than the other. Actually, I've just checked -- it's not 2k:1k, it's 2k:2k. so it should be even. > IOW, Gary's suggestion for guessing x appears to me to be sensitive to the > ham::spam ratio, but the method used for guessing spamprobs tries (with > mixed results) not to be sensitive to that ratio. Mismatching assumptions, > then. Interesting, BTW. Do you guys use the estimated X instead of a constant? Sounds like it could vary greatly depending on corpus ratios... > The X=0.53 S=0.05 result is cute -- it roughly says "it's about 50-50, but > don't pay much attention to it". There's another "sweet spot" at X=.69 and S=.42, which mystifies me; I would have thought that would cause more FPs, which is worst for the cost (see below). > I'm not sure what your cost measure is; as > we measure costs by default, an FP is charged 10, in which case the contour > lines ranging from 80 to 90 are showing the difference between one FP more > or less; this *can* make them supremely sensitive to just one or two oddball > msgs. The cost measure is a direct copy of the spambayes one, so they can be compared ;) (I also use TCR, the cost measure used by Ion Androutsopoulos' papers; but being able to see "unsures" helps us pick a good scheme which maps well into SpamAssassin scores.) BTW an interesting factor is that those scores are measured using a high "min prob strength" factor; I used 0.27. I'm running more tests where this varies, and I think that'll be quite interesting too ;) PS: while I'm here -- I'm also comparing chi2 with gary-combining. I'm finding chi2 to have quite a few more FPs in particular, right in the 0.00 spike. Do you guys see much of this? Or have I screwed up my code with all this constant-tweaking? ;) --j.

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More explicit prinout ?
by papaDoc Nov. 28, 2002

Nov. 28, 2002

Hi, I'm submitting this patch for pop3proxy. Instead of having only BayesProxyListener listening on port 6110. BayesProxyListener listening on port 6111. BayesProxyListener listening on port 6112. the patch makes pop3proxy prints BayesProxyListener listening on port 6110 for mail.gmc.ulaval.ca:110. BayesProxyListener listening on port 6111 for pop.videotron.ca:110. BayesProxyListener listening on port 6112 for pop.videotron.net:110. This helps you set your stuff, if you don't remember what is the order of the pop server in Options.py Please be nice with me this is my first python code modification. I had to look in the Documentation to find out the type of factoryArgs and then how to print a tuple. Index: pop3proxy.py =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/spambayes/spambayes/pop3proxy.py,v retrieving revision 1.26 diff -r1.26 pop3proxy.py 162c162,166 < print "%s listening on port %d." % (self.__class__.__name__, port) --- > if len(factoryArgs) >= 2: > print "%s listening on port %d for %s:%d." % (self.__class__.__name__, port, > factoryArgs[0], factoryArgs[1]) > else: > print "%s listening on port %d." % (self.__class__.__name__, port) papaDoc

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Options for the masses
by Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions Nov. 28, 2002

Nov. 28, 2002

Seeking input on the following two lists. This set of files is the 'minimum' that is needed to execute either pop3proxy or hammie*. I've not done an analysis on the outlook stuff yet. (I'd like to see mboxutils be absorbed into Corpus). chi2.py classifier.py Corpus.py dbdict.py FileCorpus.py hammie.py hammiebulk.py hammiecli.py hammiefilter.py hammiesrv.py mboxutils.py Options.py pop3proxy.py sets.py storage.py tokenizer.py I've scanned these files for options that are used. Unfortunately, they were alphabetized by my efforts to isolate them... Of these options, I've splatted the ones that I think should normally be customizable by an average user type person. address_headers basic_header_skip basic_header_tokenize basic_header_tokenize_only check_octets clue_mailheader_cutoff count_all_header_lines experimental_ham_spam_imbalance_adjustment extract_dow generate_long_skips generate_time_buckets *ham_cutoff hammie_debug_header hammie_debug_header_name *hammie_header_name *hammiefilter_persistent_storage_file hammiefilter_persistent_use_database *header_ham_string header_score_digits header_score_logarithm *header_spam_string *header_unsure_string *html_ui_launch_browser *html_ui_port max_discriminators mine_received_headers minimum_prob_strength octet_prefix_size *pop3proxy_cache_expiry_days pop3proxy_cache_use_gzip *pop3proxy_ham_cache *pop3proxy_persistent_storage_file pop3proxy_persistent_use_database pop3proxy_port *pop3proxy_ports pop3proxy_server_name pop3proxy_server_port *pop3proxy_servers *pop3proxy_spam_cache *pop3proxy_unknown_cache record_header_absence replace_nonascii_chars retain_pure_html_tags safe_headers skip_max_word_size *spam_cutoff unknown_word_prob unknown_word_strength use_chi_squared_combining use_gary_combining Opinions? c'est moi - TimS www.fourstonesExpressions.com

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