[spambayes-dev] Re: Why did python.org give this a 550 ("looks like spam")?

[Greg Ward]

On 02 October 2003, Tim Peters said:
> [Tony Meyer]
> > Any idea why this message was considered spam by mail.python.org?
> 
> I don't, so let's ask the postmaster (to whom this is copied, with your
> message as an attachment).

Probably because you sent it to spambayes-checkins.  All the *-checkins
lists on mail.{python,zope}.org share a single training corpus, and
their idea of ham is most likely diffs of Python code.

Luckily, the ever-vigilant Martijn Pieters noticed the false positive
and sent it on to spambayes-checkins anyways.  Thanks Martijn!

(And no, I don't have any plans to improve the training regime right
now; I put myself on enforced sabbatical from spam-fighting a month ago,
when I noticed it was taking over my life.)

> Suspicion:  some regular expressions were set up to reject worms, and any
> algorithm using a regular expression in the hope of accomplishing something
> non-trivial is bound to fail at times in real life.  At one recent point,
> python.org blacklisted itself on those grounds <wink>.

Nice try, Tim, but no dice.  If a rejection from python.org says "looks
like spam", that's based entirely on Spambayes.  If it was my virus
detector gone awry, it would have said "looks like a virus" (or similar).

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <gward at python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
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