[Spambayes] Using spambayes

[Katz, Amir]

One good practice I can offer to MS Outlook users - let SB move the spams to
a folder of your choice ("Junk E-mail" would be a good choice in Outlook
2003), but then move them to a special folder in a separate PST file. This
way, you keep all the spam messages but your normal PST does not grow. Then,
if at some point you run into an unrecoverable SB problem, you can build the
knowledge base from scratch by using the corpus that you kept on the side.

Amir 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Meyer [mailto:tameyer at ihug.co.nz] 
Sent: Friday, November 26, 2004 02:30
To: 'Maureen Cox'; spambayes at python.org
Subject: RE: [Spambayes] Using spambayes

> Do I then have to delete all the messages which appear in
> the junkmail folder

It's up to you.  Once they are there, they're of no use to SpamBayes.  See
FAQ 3.17:

<http://spambayes.org/faq.html#is-it-ok-to-delete-the-messages-in-the-spam-f
older>

> and if I keep doing this, will the junk mail eventually be filtered and
stop appearing ??

I'm not sure what you mean by this, so if my answer doesn't make sense,
please clarify and I'll try again :)

The way SpamBayes works is that it initially knows nothing about what you
think is good mail (ham) and what you think is bad mail (spam).  You teach
it by giving it examples of ham and spam, and it then classifies incoming
mail based on that knowledge.

The way that we recommend Outlook users train is to use the "Delete as spam"
and "Recover from spam" buttons (or just drag the messages to the ham/spam
folders) on all messages that end up in the unsure (Possible Junk) folder
and any messages that are incorrect (ham in the spam folder, spam not
moved).  It shouldn't take very much training before classification is very
good.

=Tony.Meyer

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