[Spambayes] Virus Bulletin Anti-spam Testing

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Martijn Grooten schreef:
> Dear Amedee, others,
> 
> Thank you for your email.
> 
> To answer your question: if I understand it correctly, Spambayes
> takes an email message (header + body) as input and outputs either
> 'spam' or 'ham'. (I know many products actually output a likeliness
> percentage, but by setting a threshold this has the same effect.)

Spambayes outputs a number between 0.00 and 0.99.

> This does not necessarily have to be a problem: we could possibly
> install Spambayes on the server which redistributes the email and,
> once an email is redistributed, make it check whether it thinks the
> email is ham or spam and store that in the database. Note, however,
> that for various reasons, we do not 'teach' the filters by providing
> them with end user feedback.

Teaching is essential for Spambayes. It simply cannot work if it doesn't
get a statistically relevant corpus of ham and spam to train on.
Without training, all emails will get a score of 0.50.

I don't want to speak on behalf of the developers, but I'm afraid that
Spambayes falls outside the rules of your test.

Kind regards,

Amedee Van Gasse