[Spambayes] Whitelisting

[Nick Vincent]

Hi,

I've been using SpamBayes for a month or so now and have found it excellent,
and already have a number of other people using it on recommendation.
Thanks to the team for all their hard work, and particularly for their very
active participation in the project.

I've followed the debate about whitelisting, but would like to add my few
pence.  I agree in principal that whitelisting should occur naturally as a
result of training, but in practice this is not working for me, and I
suspect that others may see the same problem.

I receive a number of mailings which contain a combination of what I term as
ham and spam in the same mail, e.g. an amount of ham content supported by a
lot of spam advertisement.  I refer particularly dictionary.com's "word of
the day" mailing as this causes me the most trouble.  Training this as ham
(for a month) seems not to be working as it is still getting classified at
appx 48% unsure every day.  Training on these messages, which I know to
contain many spam words as well as a small slice of ham I will effectively
be reducing the efficacy of the filter by ruling out good spam clues.

For this reason I would propose an "advanced user" whitelist (not available
by default perhaps? just in a text file?) which would allow me to completely
ignore mails which I know contain conflicting ham/spam data.

Nick