[Spambayes] Important: new feature!

[Tony Meyer]

> I understand what you're saying, and I've re-trained 
> spambayes on equal numbers of HAM and SPAM, 300 each. Yet, it 
> still has a tendency to classify some HAM as spam. A 
> significant percentage is like maybe 25% of my regular 
> announcement mail gets spamflagged...

Something is definitely not working here - a 25% false positive rate is
extraordinarily high.  You shouldn't even get as high as 2.5%.  Perhaps you
could send the spam clues report for one of these messages (before any
training on it) to the list?  We could take a look at it and see if there's
an obvious reason that it's failing to be classified correctly.

> Perhaps I have a better 
> solution: I have a lot of mailtraffic from the local 
> university network and a lot of correspondence, announcements 
> etc arrive from addresses with the "phys.uu.nl" suffix. 
> Surely it must be possible to exclude messages whose 
> returnaddress contain that string (or other certified 
> addresses) from further processing by spambayes?

This is called "whitelisting", and SpamBayes does not do it.  For a lengthy
explanation, please see FAQ 6.6:

<http://spambayes.org/faq.html#why-don-t-you-add-whitelisting-blacklisting-t
o-spambayes>

You ought to be able to implement some sort of whitelisting with Outlook's
rule system, however.

=Tony Meyer

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