[Spambayes] My mail is being picked up as SPAM

Jesse Pelton jsp at PKC.com
Mon Dec 11 20:03:42 CET 2006


The only thing you and your customers can do to avoid being flagged as
spam by Bayesian filters is to make sure your messages don't look like
what recipients classify as spam. That's a tall order, of course;
different people have different ideas of what constitutes spam, and the
language used in spam changes somewhat over time.
 
Probably the most important thing you can do is to send only plain text
messages - no HTML. Unfortunately, that may be unpalatable to your
customers. If your system constructs HTML messages, I suppose you could
analyze the tags that are popular with spammers at any given time and
try to avoid using them, but you'd be running just as fast as you could
trying to stay where you are. (I'm not even sure that would work; it
depends on how filters tokenize HTML.)
 
Other than that, you can assure your customers that some of their
messages will almost certainly be classified as spam. SpamBayes does not
automatically delete messages precisely because occasional
misclassification is inevitable. They might be able to reduce this by
asking themselves whether their messages sound like spam, but Bayesian
filters are often sharper than humans, so this might not work.
 
At the risk of consorting with the devil, I'd suggest offering a tuning
service. Give your customers a way to run a trial message through a
number of spam filters and see how it scores, tweak it, and try again.
Maybe you could have consultants advise customers about how to adjust
their language. Maybe you could even make money at it. But part of the
reason I'm willing to make the suggestion where spammers can see it is
because I doubt it would work particularly well. Well-trained Bayesian
filters act astonishingly intelligently.
 
For what it's worth, I would regard a SpamBayes spam score of 0 - 5% as
"quite low." Almost everything with a score in the 40 - 60% range meets
my definition of spam. Of course, your filter may be different.

________________________________

From: spambayes-bounces at python.org [mailto:spambayes-bounces at python.org]
On Behalf Of Mel Jensen
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 11:37 AM
To: spambayes at python.org
Subject: [Spambayes] My mail is being picked up as SPAM



Hello,

 

I'm a web developer, and my company provides an off the shelf ecommerce
solution, which in turn allows the webstore owners to communicate to
their customers via email.  We have recently changed email systems to
Mdaemon, and since then, some mails I receive from the system are being
flagged as follows:

 

1.6 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%

 

This in itself isn't too bad, as it's still quite low, and varies from
email to email, but I would like to issue some guidelines on the site
that certain things will trigger SPAM filters, and as we are certainly
not in the business of SPAM, and would remove anyone from our system
immediately should they be communicating to people unless they had
expressly opted-in, I'm wondering if you offer any guidelines for
companies such as ourselves.  

 

My customers are getting annoyed that their customers, whom want to
receive information about special offers, are not always receiving them.
We have introduced a whitelisting policy and guidelines, but I want to
have the best chance of delivering high quality, desired emails, and I
want to do it right.

 

Thank you in advance,

Mel

 

T. 01784 419968

F. 01784 419969

 

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