[Spambayes] Re: Spambayes Digest, Vol 52, Issue 26

[Bill Yerazunis]

   From: "T. Alexander Popiel" <popiel@wolfskeep.com>

   [...]

   I now well understand why Tim Peters lost interest in algorithm
   tweaking; until the amount of spam leaking through increases by an
   order of magnitude, I'm probably just going to ignore it, as I
   ignored it for the five years before last summer.  The good is the
   enemy of the perfect, too.

Completely correct.  When testing for > 99.9% accuracy requires that
you grab fresh spam for a month, and the spam mutation rate introduces
new spams at almost that rate, it just isn't fun any more.

The question to ask is "how good is good enough?"  As a human I'm good
to 99.84 % accuracy in classifying spam, so maybe that's good enough
and the pursuit of four-nines accuracy is a windmill to tilt at.

I'm not sure yet, but it's an interesting hypothesis to consider.

    -Bill Yerazunis