[Spambayes] What is spam?

[Neale Pickett]

So then, Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net> is all like:

> > With only one or two exceptions, that is the extent of my false
> > positives and false negatives.
> >
> > I have to wonder, though, if the forwards (#3) are really false
> > negatives.
> 
> False negative means that you put them in a spam folder but that the system
> said they were ham.  Is that what you meant to say?

Yeah.  In other words, grandma sends me a lot of stuff which looks, even
to me, to be a hand-written essay which was well thought-out by
*somebody*, even if it does happen to be totally false :)

The classifier is saying that most of these are ham, but I've got them
in the spam corpus.  So what I'm thinking is, maybe I'm expecting too
much of it (especially given my small datasets) to identify these things
as spam.

Given that, do you think it would be more useful to the tests if I
classified them as ham?  I realize that with enough training it'll start
to recognize "good times" and other urban legends, but I don't want to
screw up my tests just because I'm capable of discerning content and the
classifier isn't.  I mean, these messages are pretty obviously not in
the same category as real UCE.

Neale