On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 04:18:07 pm Matej Cepl wrote: > Steven D'Aprano, Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:58:28 +1000: > > The missus uses Thunderbird, and as near as we can tell, its spam > > filtering is crap. She found false negative rates approaching 50% > > (half the actual spam was flagged as good) and false positive rates > > approaching 10% (one out of ten good emails was flagged as spam). > > No, it isn't, but the problem is that as every Bayesian filter (and I > am a big fan of them), it needs a lot of training. Thunderbird trying > to be easy of use hides its users from this ugly fact[1] and delivers > some kind of generalized set of trained data for some generalized > entity eliminating by it the biggest strength of Bayesian filters, > which is that they are unpredictable by spammers and indivualized to > ones mailing patterns. If properly trained (by several THOUSAND of > BOTH spam and ham messages), it can work pretty well.
Sounds like crap to me *grins*. SpamAssassin gives very good results "out of the box", without training, and performs even better when trained against a hundred or so spams and hams. I know people who run SA with Bayesian filtering essentially disabled (they give it a score of zero and never do any learning) and still get excellent results from it. I guess Thunderbird's real problem is it relies entirely on Bayesian filtering. My wife's biggest problem was Thunderbird's general mail filter, which seemed to be just out-and-out buggy. -- Steven D'Aprano _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
