[Spambayes] Warning Message

[Kenny Pitt]

papaDoc wrote:
> Glenn Merritts wrote:
> 
>> What I have been doing, which sounds like I am doing wrong is
>> clicking 
>> on "delete as spam" for each email in my suspects folder. What I
>> think 
>> you are telling me is to click on just a few of the email and delete
>> the others (if they are really spam) and then see what the next day
>> count in the suspects folder looks like. I would do this after
>> resetting the program. 
>> 
>> Do I understand your advice?
> 
> Yes ;-)

It is possible to be a little more "scientific" about this if you wish.
First go to Help->About SpamBayes in the SpamBayes dropdown and look at the
"Viewing and Using the Spam Score Field" section.  Make sure the spam score
is displayed in your Suspects folder, and then you can click the column
header in Outlook to sort by that column.

Sort the messages in ascending order of spam score.  Click "Delete as Spam"
on several of the lowest scoring spams.  Then go to the SpamBayes dropdown
and select "Filter messages..."  In "Filter the following folders" use the
Browse button to select only your Suspects folder.  In "Filter action"
choose "Score messages".  Now click "Start Filtering" and the messages will
be rescored based on the updated training.  When scoring is finished, the
dialog will show the count of the number of spam, unsure and good messages.
If there are still unsure messages then click Close and repeat this process
until the dialog reports 0 unsure or until you have trained on all the
messages in Suspects.

You might also want to consider reducing the Certain Spam score on the
Filtering tab of SpamBayes Manager.  The default value is set high to
prevent false positives.  After some training, most people can reduce the
cutoff score to 75 or 80 at most, especially if you are seeing very few of
your good messages show up in Suspects.

> Since I'm not using Outlook but the Pop3 proxy (but they work on the
> same principle), I can't tell you where to click but this is what I
> do.  
> 
> Sometime I'm also selecting some ham even if they are correctly
> classified and train with them since usually I have more spam in the
> unsure folder.  

Training on correctly classified good messages isn't as easy in Outlook
because the "Recover from Spam" button is not shown in folders that contain
good messages.  It can be done, however, by moving some of your good
messages to the Suspects folder and using "Recover from Spam" on them from
there.

-- 
Kenny Pitt