[Spambayes] Still getting horrible results from SpamBayes - Any advice?

Peter Beckman beckman at purplecow.com
Sun Sep 14 16:51:51 EDT 2003


On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Adam Lasnik wrote:

> I've now filtered more mail (approximately 1000 ham and spam), and
> SpamBayes' performance has remained abysmal (only 1 false negative but
> more than 30% false negatives) :(

 You mean 30% of your mail goes to the unsure folder, or 30% of your mail
 is spam, or 30% of the spam goes into your inbox?

> What's especially frustrating is that I've classified many of the
> nearly-exact-same spams -- such as the Nigerian spams, also the "I just
> saw your profile and I'm new to the area..." crap and so on -- as spam,
> but this doesn't help.  Subsequent copies of this stuff gets scored at
> 0% or a mere 4%.

 Nigerian Scam spams are difficult -- while they have the same concept and
 idea, they don't all use the exact same form letter.  Most spam uses URLs,
 HTML, images, works like "porn" "viagra" etc, stuff that's easy to filter.

 Nigerian scam spam is usually warm and fuzzy, translated by someone
 differently each time.  They are sent by individuals who use their own
 software, rather than hire a professional spammer.

 There will always be the spam you can't filter.  It's impossible to filter
 everything 100% of the time.

 Now granted, you should be seeing more like a 98% spam removal... but I
 dunno.  I moved the spam-cutoff from .90 to .80, and that helped to remove
 some from the unsure box.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at purplecow.com                             http://www.purplecow.com/
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