[Spambayes] Spambayes confusion

[Tony Meyer]

> I have more spam than Ham before and just a few days
> ago the reverse was true. How do you level it out??!

If you're asking how to do level out the amount you receive: you can't.  If
you're asking how to level out the amount that you use to train SpamBayes,
then there are lots of things you can do.  The easiest is to just train on
messages that spambayes gets wrong, or classifies as unsure.

> Also why am I still getting all the Spam? I mean of course
> spammers change their email addresses etc...so how can
> Spambayes ever stop that?

The spam should be being classified as spam, which means you can filter it
off somewhere, for example a separate folder.  If you review this
occasionally (to catch any mistakes) you can then delete it without having
to spend lots of time on it.  SpamBayes doesn't care all that much about the
email address that the spammer uses - it looks at the whole message and
decides whether it looks like what you've called spam in the past.  This
includes the words used, where it was from, and lots of other things.

> I am too stupid for this program!!

I'm sure that's not true.  There are two things here:

  1.  SpamBayes is a young program and (excluding the Outlook (not Express)
plug-in) isn't as easy to set up as it one day will be.  Likewise, the
documentation is better than it once was, but will continue to improve.

  2.  Once SpamBayes is setup and running, there isn't much to it, so you
can almost forget about it.  It's only the initial setup and getting used to
doing training every now and then that has a steep learning curve.

=Tony Meyer

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