[Spambayes] A spam filter that overlooks basics

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Tue, February 3, 2009 09:07, Gene Mannacio wrote:
> I have been using Spambayes for about a year now and have updated to the
> latest version.  My operating system is Windows Vista Ultimate and my
> Outlook is one of the components of Office 2007.  I think you'll find my
> configuration is not relevant to the question I have, though.  While I may
> be overlooking something I do not see a "White List" or "Black List" in
> the
> product.  Absent this feature I would expect certain things to be learned
> when your product is first trained.  This appears NOT to be the case.  For
> example, I have a college classmate, Ora Smith, who is in my contact list
> Friends Group and NotFromSpam  group.  I also have sent many messages to
> him
> and received many messages from him before installing your product.
> Despite
> this, I have found messages from him in the "Possible Spam " folder.
> Right
> clicking on the message I find no way to white list him but I do use the
> recover from spam button.  Despite all this his messages continued to
> appear
> in the Possible Spam folder for quite some time. Is it unreasonable for me
> to expect that:
>
> 1.	Anyone on your contact list or in a group on your contact list
> should NEVER be put in a spam folder or possible spam folder unless their
> messages have been deleted as spam on many occasions.
> 2.	Anyone to whom you've sent an e-mail on more than or replied to on
> more  than two occasions should not have their messages put in a spam
> folder
> or possible spam folder.
> 3.	Any e-mail recovered from spam will result in the filter considering
> future e-mails from the same e-mail address as not spam unless there is a
> mix of deleted (e.g. advertising messages) and retained purchase or fax
> messages.
>
> Suffice it to say, your filter seems deficient to me in these respects and
> I
> hope this will be corrected.
>
> Regards,
> Eugene Mannacio

Hello Eugene,

Perhaps this may come as a surprise, but your question has already been
asked multiple times. The answer has always been that Spambayes does not
have a black/white list, nor does it need one.

You wrote that you train Spambayes by recovering from spam. That's a good
thing, keep doing that!
You also wrote that you use Outlook. Somewhere on the Spambayes website is
explained how you can add an extra column that shows the spam score in %.
Untrained, Spambayes gives ever email a score of 50%.
After training on one mail from your friend, the score for that class of
emails may go down to 40% (just an example). After the next trained mail,
perhaps 30%. After some trained mails, the majority of good mails will
have a score below the ham treshold that you have configured.
If you give it enough training and love, Spambayes wil learn. It's just
like a young puppy. :-)

If you really, *really* want a white or black list, you can always do that
yourself. I use Procmail as MDA on Linux, and I have set up a few rules
that move mail from my friends or from trusted mailing lists to separate
folders. Only after those rules will I add Spambayes to Procmail.
(I have no rules for known spammers in Procmail. They go into my Postfix
header checks. That way I reject them before their mail enters my server.)

I believe you can do something similar in the Outlook plugin. Set it to
background filtering, set the delay to a few seconds (2 is usually
enough), and then create Outlook rules that move mail from your friends to
separate folders.

You see, Spambayes is not broken. It works as designed. Spambayes doesn't
claim to be the one spamfilter that rules them all. In my opinion it only
does one thing, and it does that one little thing as good as it can. I use
it as only one little part of my long chain of anti-spam measures.

Kind regards from a fellow Spambayes user,
Amedee Van Gasse