From: "Stewart Nelson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Hi Bob,
>
> Many thanks for taking the time to send such a detailed reply.
>
> > Your situation is similar to mine, but I'm still at SA 2.63. Last week's
> > performance stunk at 0 false positives and 20 false negatives (a rotten
> > 99.5% accuracy record; I'm not satisfied unless I hit 99.8%).
>
> That's awesome; I'd be happy with 97%, as long as there are almost no
> false positives on unicast mail.
I get about 1000 emails a day on the average. I get about 260 to 275
spams a day. In a couple of the last few weeks I received zero mis-
identified spams and maybe one mis-identified Linux Kernel Mailing
List mailings tagged as spam with low spam scores.
This last week bas been hell (note the lower case "h" - call it say
minihell - where mini-me goes.) I've had as many as two missed spams
a day. And I have still misidentified a couple LKML items as spam.
Not a single one of those LKML items was 'critical' let alone important
to my needs.
It seems in the last week and a half a new generation of spam tricks
has been launched. Bayes seems to get them, though. So it's all
climbing back to sanity slowly. Those few weeks with 100% spam and
99.95% ham correctness were heaven, so much so that the random miss
is now annoying out of proportion with reality.
By the way, only 10% of these escaped spams made it all the way to
my real mailbox. I have a vicious and effective set of OE folder
filters, too. "Prodigy" is still a word that finds its way into my
spam box. So are "msn.com" and the like if none of the mailing list
filters catch the mail first. {^_-}
SARE rules, manual spam training, and patience gets you there. BTW,
I don't do the black hole lists. So that may be why things are slipping
through. BigEvil is getting old. And one pattern I have been noticing
of late is that there is a domain registration proxy service out there
somewhere. If that turns up in email I figure it that email should be
scored with a modest 10 or so as spam. (And from the looks of things
GoDaddy also stinks on ice lately.) I wonder how long before some
super aggressive black hole list uses such whois registrations to block
whole registrars. In my foul moods it seems like a good idea. Most of
the time rationality wins out over my foul moods, though.
