[spambayes-dev] Re: spambayes-dev Digest, Vol 12, Issue 15

[Thomas Juntunen]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 04/16/04, Skip Montanaro imposed order on a stream of electrons to say:

>One thing I think we need to be careful of is using test data sets whose
>messages are too old.  It's apparent the spammers are a moving target, so
>what worked one or six months ago (or perhaps even a week ago) may not work
>as well today.

You might be surprised. I've saved all the spam I've received since late 2000. In recent months, I set up SpamAssassin 2.6.1 with the default rules and ran everything (some 12K messages) through it. A guy named Terry Sullivan (who knows a _lot_ more about statistics than I do) analyzed them and presented some conclusions about spam volatility at the MIT conference this past January. He composed a summary article about it here:

http://www.qaqd.com/research/spam-e1.htm

The upshot was spam changes a lot more slowly than common thought suggests.


Thomas Juntunen

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP SDK 3.0

iQA/AwUBQICAPdFoei/9T3YdEQIf1QCgknpLGMgUAaQSChg+GNw3mL0feCoAoJEi
0CprW+cw1AISUFLI8qC0Jm3n
=lGJK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----