Mailman 3 March 2003 - 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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Latest spammer trick stymied
by Richard Jowsey April 2, 2003

April 2, 2003

Lately (as prophesied), there have been a number of very short spams arriving, containing only a singleton URL. My proxy's classifier was giving these an "unsure" rating -- too few clues. But, these buggers were starting to become quite annoying... So today I added a simple web-crawler, which will venture out on demand and slurp the words off any site. This little hoover is only unleashed when the number of distinct clues/words in an email is less than 150, it's heading for the "unsure" bucket, and we find an http URL in there. The entire source HTML is then whacked through the tokenizer and classified. The extra servlet processing can take a couple seconds, mostly network overhead, and really only noticeable when paying close attention to message download times, but the results are really worth it! It nails them dead. Cheers! Richard

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RE: RE: [Spambayes] setup
by Vaughan, David April 2, 2003

April 2, 2003

I finally figured out my problem. Netscape Webmail uses imap and my employer does not have that port opened up. It works at home but not here at the office. Go figure. Will Spambayes work with imap or must it be pop3? -----Original Message----- From: Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions [mailto:tim@fourstonesExpressions.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 2:37 PM To: Vaughan, David; Spambayes Subject: Re: RE: [Spambayes] setup 3/18/2003 1:29:15 PM, "Vaughan, David" <David.Vaughan(a)trizetto.com> wrote: > > It's not supposed to be this hard :-) > > I'll keep trying but presently am unable to set up POP3. I get the >message "Connection to server imap.mail.netcenter.com timed out." but can >not find in the Netscape 7.02 preferences where to set the server name. pop3proxy does not support imap servers at this time. For that matter, there isn't any imap support in spambayes at this point in time... :( c'est moi - TimS http://www.fourstonesExpressions.com http://wecanstopspam.org

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Getting a mbox file from Outlook Express
by Moore, Paul April 1, 2003

April 1, 2003

I'm trying to get a friend set up with Spambayes using Outlook Express. To get some initial training sorted, it would be nice to get a mbox file of some of his existing messages which he could train on. But I can't find a way of getting OE to save a mbox file. Is there a way? Any OE victims around here...? Thanks, Paul.

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Re: [Spambayes] Latest spammer trick stymied
by T. Alexander Popiel April 1, 2003

April 1, 2003

In message: <3E893DA7.31420.20D35DB@localhost> "Richard Jowsey" <richard(a)jowsey.com> writes: >> We have to be careful with this. It would be relatively simple to >> stymie, by simply adding two urls, the spam one, and an unrelated >> innocent site. Or three urls, or whatever... > >Spammers are simple folk. They won't be putting no innocent url's in >these spams... Spammers might be simple folk, but serious crackers (not the script kiddies) certainly are not. If there comes to be a widely deployed tool with this sort of fetch-what-I-tell-you-to behaviour, then it will get exploited by people wanting to do a denial of service attack or similar. Why bother sending out your own IRC-controlled worm, when there's already remote-controllable spamfilters ready and waiting to pound a site into the ground? After all, writing (and releasing) a worm is already recognized as a crime, but the legality of just sending out a not-as-innocent-as-it-looks email blast is still in contention... - Alex

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Re: [Spambayes] Latest spammer trick stymied
by Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions March 31, 2003

March 31, 2003

3/31/2003 4:15:29 PM, "T. Alexander Popiel" <popiel(a)wolfskeep.com> wrote: >In message: <3E893DA7.31420.20D35DB@localhost> > "Richard Jowsey" <richard(a)jowsey.com> writes: >>> We have to be careful with this. It would be relatively simple to >>> stymie, by simply adding two urls, the spam one, and an unrelated >>> innocent site. Or three urls, or whatever... >> >>Spammers are simple folk. They won't be putting no innocent url's in >>these spams... > >Spammers might be simple folk, but serious crackers (not the script >kiddies) certainly are not. If there comes to be a widely deployed >tool with this sort of fetch-what-I-tell-you-to behaviour, then it >will get exploited by people wanting to do a denial of service >attack or similar. Why bother sending out your own IRC-controlled >worm, when there's already remote-controllable spamfilters ready >and waiting to pound a site into the ground? After all, writing >(and releasing) a worm is already recognized as a crime, but the >legality of just sending out a not-as-innocent-as-it-looks email >blast is still in contention... EXCELLENT point, Alex. Case closed. > >- Alex > >_______________________________________________ >Spambayes mailing list >Spambayes(a)python.org >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes > > c'est moi - TimS http://www.fourstonesExpressions.com http://wecanstopspam.org There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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Added headers and no newline
by Juergen Hermann March 31, 2003

March 31, 2003

Hi! I did not check whether this was fixed yet, I get a lot of this X-Spambayes-Classification: ham X-Spambayes-MailId: 1049128650-2 X-Spambayes-Spam-Probability: 8.78190881126e-009 X-Spambayes-Evidence: '*H*': 0.00; '*S*': 0.00; 'subject:] ': 0.00; 'url:listinfo': 0.00; 'url:mailman': 0.00; 'skip:_ 40': 0.00; 'url:python': 0.00; 'email addr:python.org': 0.00; 'subject:[': 0.00; 'europython': 0.00; 'email name:europython': 0.00; 'subject:EuroPython': 0.00; 'url:europython': 0.00; 'header:Received:7': 0.00; 'idea.': 0.00; 'url:mail': 0.00; 'url:org': 0.00; 'header:Errors-To:1': 0.00; 'think': 0.00; 'good': 0.00; 'space': 0.00; 'list': 0.00; 'mailing': 0.00; 'some': 0.00; 'big': 0.00; 'will': 0.00; 'url:html': 0.00; 'url:www': 0.00; 'lives': 0.00; 'url:index': 0.00 Open Space was a big success at PyCon. I think having some will be a good idea. The OpenSpace manifesto lives here:' http://www.openspaceworld.org/english/index.html with a few weeks old spambayes. The newline before the body is missing, thus the first part of the message is not shown normally in the email client. I'll update anyway. Ciao, Jürgen

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Spambayes/procmail
by David Abrahams March 31, 2003

March 31, 2003

I want to set up spambayes to work with procmail on my mail server. Does anyone have experience with that? If not, will someone please discuss it with me? I'm particularly interested in what the model for getting new spam/ham classifications to procmail might be. My last query of 24 February went completely unanswered, which is a little discouraging. I have quite a learning curve to overcome, having no experience with procmail and little with IMAP. If someone who knows a little about SpamBayes could at least help me figure out which questions I need to answer in order to get started, that would be a big help. Thanks! -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com

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