Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> wrote: [...] > SpamAssassin achieves a false-positive rate (non-spam reported as spam) > of 5% with a default threshold of 5. This can be dramatically improved > using a whitelist, to ~98% in my experience. This is not the best > performance of all filters, so makes a somewhat generous threshold.
> http://www.spamassassin.org/dist/rules/STATISTICS.txt > http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/964/ > So a spam-reduction system user would at worst see a typical rate of 2% > of spam to be manually disposed of. [...] You are mixing up percentages. "5% non-spam reported as spam" ... can be ... improved to ~98% ... I would not use a filter which would tag 98% of my regular mail as spam. Perhaps you wanted to write 2%? No, does not match either, because the last sentence does not talk about false-positive at all, it talks about false negatives, i.e. spam that was tagged as non-spam. When I last checked my personal rate with spamassassin 2.55 with default rules and no DNS lists or razor (but including a rather well trained bayesian filter) and a default threshold of 5, I came up with these numbers[1]: * 0% false positives, i.e. ham sorted into the spam folder * 10% of the spam was not recognized as such and I had to filter it out by hand. Of course the numbers depend a lot on the people you are communicating with, if your partners used Lotus Notes and sended everything in html you might get false positives with score 5. A properly trained bogofilter will give better results but is not as effective as site wide service an requires more work to keep it properly trained. cu andreas [1] I am quite happy with these, I can live with ~10 spams per day in my inbox. -- Hey, da ist ein Ballonautomat auf der Toilette! Unofficial _Debian-packages_ of latest unstable _tin_ http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ametzler/debian/tin-snapshot/
