On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 03:36:09PM -0500, Alan Shutko wrote: > Jonathan Matthews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I think we're talking at cross purposes - I meant "I find it strange > > that the excuses cited should be taken as reasons for the mail to be > > less likely to be spam", not any other reading. > > Spamassassin default scores are set using a genetic algorithm[1]. > Basically, there's a large corpus of spam and non-spam, the scores > are set at some default value, then modified by the algorithm until > they accurately categorize the spam in the test corpus. > > So, yes, it may seem strange that those things are used more on > non-spam than spam, but in their tests, that's exactly the case. I > get lots of legitimate email that has those phrases... random things > I have subscribed to.
Well, it could be used more in spam and still be justifiably negative. That'd happen if it was used in spam, but all the spam (in their test set) that had it hit enough _other_ tags that it wasn't useful, and it helped decide (correctly) in some non-spam cases. > If you don't feel that score reflects the true spaminess on your > mail, that's the perfect reason to change it in your prefs. Indeed. Though you have to be careful about false positives: One mailing list that I'm on is falsely labeled as spam by the (stable) spamassasin, and is unlike the rest of my email. Jon Leonard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
