Re: A different approach to scoring spamassassin hits

[Loren Wilton]

And after typing all this I'm thinking you might be right. But part  of 
this approach is to run all these rules in YES/NO fashion and see  if the 
probability is significant.  For example:  If I tested for  SOME_TEST=NO 
and found it was scoring a probability of ~0.500 then  it's indisputable 
that you are right.

Well, this still doesn't make any real sense to me; it seems equivalent to 
the attempts at bayes poison that spammers stick into their spams: a bunch 
of words totally unrelated to the mail in the hopes of outweighing the 
useful terms.  Now their trick works as a good spam indication because the 
words they pick aren't common to my ham mails, so it is really a good spam 
indication rather than poison.  I'm not immediately convinced that will hold 
for the usage you intend. Maybe.  Maybe not.

However, if you want to do this, remember that bayes works on tokens and has 
a tokenizer.  So SOME_RULE=YES is probably either two or three tokens, and 
you will end up scoring on the probability of YES and NO, along with the 
frequency of the rule names, which will be 1.  So you probably want to do 
NO_SOME_RULE and YES_OTHER_RULE or the like when you build the insert list. 
Again though I'm not sure I see the point in the yes and no factors; the 
presence or absense of a word in the mail seems like a pretty good yes/no 
indication to me.

Were I doing it I'd try it both ways and see if there is any difference in 
results.

       Loren