[Spambayes] Getting rid of max_spamprob and min_spamprob

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Mon, 16 Sep 2002 13:45:06 -0400


[Greg Ward]
> You keep talking as though I *enjoy* reviewing 5-20 spams every morning
> for false positives.  Anything but!

Heh.  Greg, I have a hard time believing that reviewing 20 msgs by eyeball
for spam-vs-ham can consume more than two minutes.  I do this on hundreds of
msgs every day, and it's barely reached annoyance level.

> I want a 100% accurate spam detector, where every message is either
> definitely spam or definitely not-spam.
>
> But then, who doesn't?

Easy:  hire me to look at your spam.  I'll be happy to review this stuff for
you, at $1 per message, plus a 25-cent surcharge for each farm porn reviewed
(I have *some* standards <wink>).

Every scheme makes mistakes, so Neil and I were speculating about a way that
*might* produce a useful "I'm not sure about this one" indicator from a
Graham-like scheme.  As is, the scheme claims to be nearly 100% certain of
its decisions nearly 100% of the time, and is wrong so seldom in my tests
that I can't reliably measure the error rates any more despite training on
more than 10,000 of each per run.