[Spambayes] [spambayes-dev] WG: false positive

[Kenny Pitt]

On 5/2/07, Wilhelm Klenner <wk at klenner.at> wrote:
> thank you very much for answering my emergency-call. A few days before you answered I bought a new PC with Vista and office 2007. I also installed Spambayes on this system and - don't ask me why - after a few "recover from spam" klicks my voice-mails where not spamfiltered anymore.
>
> Maybe the database on the old installation XP/OL2003 got a litte bit funny after ~ 18 month of duty.

That's actually a pretty typical result. When people report that they
are having problems training the filter to handle certain types of
messages, the most common cause is that the training database has
become significantly "unbalanced". After you've been training the
filter for a long period of time, you may notice that you've trained
significantly more spam messages than good, or vice versa. That can
negatively impact the accuracy of the filter in general, but it can
also make training more difficult because you have to overcome the
imbalance before the filter will be able to classify the new type of
messages correctly.

-- 
Kenny Pitt