[clug] Spambayes

[Mark Triggs]

Nemo -earth native- <nemo at cheeky.house.cx> writes:

> I'm increasingly finding I'm putting thought into this... SO, straw poll
> time. 
>
> Q: What spamfiltering system do people use?

Brett has already mentioned his success using a Bayesian filter, but
I'll just quickly throw in my two cents anyway :o). I'm using bogofilter
0.10.1.4 (another Bayesian filter) and have found that within a short
amount of time it catches most of my spam with very few false positives.

> Q: Is it trainable?

Yep.

> Q: If it is, do you update it with ALL messages once classified as
> spam/ham, or only with false pos/neg results? (or not at all? Or
> something else?)

I trained mine by feeling it the last 10 ham messages from each of the
mailing lists I'm subscribed to, and all of the spam I currently had
sitting in my spam box (somewhere between 30 - 40 messages). Over the
next week it might have missed one or two spam messages and gave one
false positive (mail from an outlook user), but since then it seems to
have Just Worked.

Once you're confident that it is unlikely to catch false positives, you
can have it update its lists of spam/ham words automatically as it
receives new messages, so little manual intervention is required.

Cheers,

Mark
-- 
Mark Triggs
<mst at dishevelled.net>