Daniel Quinlan said:
> > I really don't see it that way. I really don't think just looking at the
> > false postitives and negatives is looking at the whole picture. Ignoring
> > the hits in the middle would be like ignoring successes )complete or
> > partial and only focusing on failures IMHO.
>
> I don't think you understand. Anything that isn't a FP or FN is, by
> definition, a success. So, if you have fewer FPs and fewer FNs, then
> you must have more successes. There is nothing else.
Yep. SpamAssassin is designed to assign a mail a rating of "spam" or
"not spam", nothing more. The "score" is a red herring, in the overall
view.
> I don't care if a message is a few points one way or the other unless
> it's really close to my threshold (in which case, I'm basically
> changing my acceptance rate for FPs and FNs, but the ratio stays about
> the same).
Yep. The "threshold" stuff is basically a way for the user to say
one of these things:
- I want an aggressive filter which will catch more spam, but at the
cost of me having to fish out a false-positive from the bin (trash)
more frequently
- I want as few FPs as possible
- I want a 0.001% FP rate per year
It's just a way to tweak the FN/FP rate, no more, no less.
The scores fall out of this nicely, but they are a distraction from the
real purpose.
--j.
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