[Spambayes] counterweight: it really works!

[Tim Peters]

[TimS]
> The thing that SB has that SA doesn't is the ongoing ability to
> train a database according to the USER'S definition of spam.
> SA has some configurability, but who actually does that?  Who wants
> to download updates?

Email adminstrators do both, and *because* the SB code needs to learn about
ham as well as spam, and opt-in marketing email is so user-specific, it
remains a puzzle how to use this code for, e.g., an email admin serving
1,000 accounts.  The SB code appears quite capable of handling python.org's
mailing list traffic with a lot less bother and resource consumption than SA
requires, but I still don't think it will work well if we fold in the
personal email carried by python.org too.

> SB lets me say "This is spam.  Learn from this" or "This is ham..."  I'm
> not going back.  :)

Provided we can make ongoing training easy enough, I expect single-user
installations will enjoy training SB more than downloading SA, and that it
will work better for them (e.g., there are *some* kinds of spam I want to
see, and training my classifier to accept that kind was, like everything
else, just a matter of putting examples in my ham folder).