[Spambayes] Spambayes being too aggressive

[Kenny Pitt]

If you define "aggressiveness" as the cutoff scores at which SpamBayes
considers a message to be unsure or spam, you can control those using the
Filtering tab in SpamBayes Manager.
 
Note, however, that SpamBayes never "deletes" a message. The messages have
been moved either to your spam folder, or more likely to your unsure folder.
 
Any message that contains very few characteristics that match other messages
that you have trained as either spam or good will end up in the unsure
folder. This may happen the first time you get a message from a new vendor.
No matter how you adjust the cutoff scores, you are not likely to be able to
prevent this "unsure" behavior without completely destroying the
effectiveness of the filter. The unsure folder is one of the primary design
features of SpamBayes, indicating messages that should be reviewed and
trained appropriately.
 
If most of the messages from your vendors are in regard to similar products
or services, a little bit of training on these messages will probably cause
SpamBayes to properly identify the majority of messages even from unknown
vendors. If a message is misidentified and you're not sure why, you can
select the message and use the "Show spam clues" command to look at the spam
clues. This will show how each recognized word in the message was scored by
SpamBayes. The higher the word score, the more likely SpamBayes thinks it is
that this word would appear in a spam message.
 
If you're just completely stumped as to why a message scored the way it did,
just send a copy of the clues to this mailing list. Someone here can
probably analyze the clues and give you some ideas about what might have
caused the result.
 
-- 
Kenny Pitt
 

  _____  

From: spambayes-bounces+kennypitt=hotmail.com at python.org
[mailto:spambayes-bounces+kennypitt=hotmail.com at python.org] On Behalf Of
David Sorensen
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 3:12 PM
To: spambayes at python.org
Subject: [Spambayes] Spambayes being too aggressive


How do I control the aggressiveness...several of my vendors messages are are
being deleted before I see them.
Thank you
David K. Sorensen, ChFC, CLU
President
Legacy Financial Associates, Ltd.
5951 McKee Road, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53719
phone - 608.442.3450
fax - 608.442.1444
 
 
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