[Spambayes] Whitelist for SpamBayes for Outlook

Tim Peters tim.one at comcast.net
Thu Sep 11 23:45:46 EDT 2003


[Tom Boland]
> I know you say it's not needed *but it is*!!
>
> This is the only thing stopping me from implementing this product (and
> making donations) over anything else. I need to make sure that email
> from certain people (my boss, his boss, all local domain mail ,etc.)
> gets through 100% of the time.
>
> Even after several months of training, some mail from these people
> gets dumped into Quarantine: Junk. I even saved 200 messages from one
> person, trained it as good mail, and I still get mail from that
> person (my CEO, no less) sent to the Quarantine.

It sounds more like something else is going wrong.  When there's a problem,
I'd rather track down the source definitively than add new subsystems,
possibly leaving the real problem unaddressed.  Every new subsystem will
introduce new problems too, of course.

> I know, I know that this goes against your belief in the One True God
> of Bayesian filtering,

Heh -- despite the name, spambayes isn't a Bayesian filter in the sense that
most people mean it.  The only One True God we've had here is decreasing
error rates, by hook or by crook.

> but in the real world,

The heavy sarcasm isn't helping -- but it may not be hurting either <wink>.
All the developers here use spambayes too, in their own versions of the real
world.  I don't have any need for white- or black- lists in my world, so
I've got no reason to pursue them.  Free open source code developed by
volunteers in their spare time is the result of people scratching their own
itches -- if any developer here had an itch (problem) that could be relieved
by adding black or white lists, they would do so.

> we REALLY need at least a white list and preferably a blacklist, too.

Has anyone directed you at InBoxer yet?

    http://www.inboxer.com/

That's a commercial product that happens to incorporate the spambayes code
base, and adds white and black lists (among other things).  It's not free of
cost, presumably because somebody had to pay them to spend their time
implementing things that shouldn't be needed <wink>.  If you wanted to pay
to add them to spambayes too, I bet someone would agree to do the work for
hire.  Else it's going to require someone working hard to prove that there's
a real need for these gimmicks, and that the perceived need isn't actually
due to a bug in the current code, or problem with the way the system has
been trained.

> Thanks for an otherwise fantastic program. Keep up the good work.

Thank you!  It's good to hear about problems, although it's best if they're
accompanied by details and an offer to do whatever it takes to nail the
source of the problems.




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