[Spambayes] Outlook 2003 is eating our lunch ?

[Ryan Malayter]

I saw a presentation at Microsoft TechEd a couple of years back about
the spam filter technology going in to Outlook 2003 / Exchange 2003. It
did not impress me that much. From what I recall, they use a positive
and negative scoring system based on tokens. The tokens and their
"weights" are determined collectively by the huge number of Hotmail
users marking messages as spam and ham. I recall the positive/negative
token wieghts were combined with simple addition in the examples
presented; I am not sure if that's how it works in the actual code
version.

Basically, it sounded a lot like SpamAssasin's point-based rule system.
The reason it works reasonably well for a lot of people is because of
the huge Hotmail corpus that they use to statistically determine the
point values for each token. They have also released a few updates to
the rule sets since Outlook 2003 RTM, these perform marginally better
against current spam.

That said, I get something near 98% capture rate with zero false
positives using SpamBayes, so I won't be ditching it anytime soon in
favor of Outlook 2003's filter or the Exchange 2003 Intelligent Message
Filter.

Regards,
	Ryan

________________________________

	From: spambayes-bounces at python.org
[mailto:spambayes-bounces at python.org] On Behalf Of Jesse Pelton
	Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 7:16 AM
	To: Katz, Amir; spambayes at python.org
	Subject: RE: [Spambayes] Outlook 2003 is eating our lunch ?
	
	
	I imagine there will be a place for the Outlook plugin for some
time to come. I'm not quite sure why Microsoft hasn't implemented
Bayesian filtering; it's easy to understand, easy to use, and highly
effective (at least as implemented in SpamBayes). If Outlook caught 204
out of 304 spams, it may not be half bad, but it's about a third bad.
SpamBayes does much better for me, and if it doesn't, it's not hard to
retrain it. With Outlook's filtering, you take what you get.


________________________________

		From: spambayes-bounces at python.org
[mailto:spambayes-bounces at python.org] On Behalf Of Katz, Amir
		Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 4:15 AM
		To: spambayes at python.org
		Subject: [Spambayes] Outlook 2003 is eating our lunch ?
		
		
		I'm no big fan of Micro$oft, but I must admit that the
junk mail filter that comes with Outlook 2003 client is not half bad. It
intercepts almost all e-mails which are in Korean and other Asian
languages, as well as many of the normal spam. From a quick count that I
did, in the last 48 hours or so I got 304 spams, and Outlook intercepted
204 of them.
		 
		Amir