Andrew Russell wrote on Thursday, September 28, 2006 2:28 AM -0500:

I am having difficulty with just one aspect of my spambayes setup, that being where I have filtering for message rules. It appears that any message that meets the requirements of my message rule avoids the attention on spambayes.

This is by design, due to limitations of the Outlook programming interface. I didn't write the code, but I am aware that Outlook makes it difficult for add-in applications to get reliable notification of incoming mail events at a specific time relative to processing Outlook rules. Sometimes you get notification at the end of rules processing, while other times it occurs while the rules are still running. To get consistent behavior, SpamBayes has a timer that delays evaluating a message for a couple of seconds after its arrival, to insure that Outlook rules finish first. Though the delay can be annoying, if you have accumulated a large amount if incoming mail, it actually works in your favor. Most of the mail you identify in rules is either from mailing lists or has other criteria that make it unlikely to be spam in the first place. There is not much benefit in training SpamBayes to recognize this mail, as simple Outlook rules can do it reliably. By reducing the amount of mail SpamBayes has to classify, it can do a better job. For example, most of my incoming traffic is from mailing lists. Most of the lists already have spam filters (not this one, since it includes spam samples). If my Outlook rules remove all the list messages, the mail flow left for SpamBayes is personal correspondence. By not including these list messages in SpamBayes' training set, there is a wide variety of language that SpamBayes doesn't have to learn is ham. It can "concentrate" on learning the language style of my personal correspondents, and can thus more easily discern spam. -- Seth Goodman