[Spambayes] Odd behavior with messages

[Tony Meyer]

> Basically I have been saving my spam for sometime based on 
> your statement and some others.  I have tons of good mail and 
> wanted to give it corss sections to train on.  What I could 
> do is copy a few messages from each folder of the good mail 
> and then train on it.  I have a lot of log reports and status 
> emails so training is very important and I must say none of 
> those messages get caught.  I also get very few suspects these days.
> 
> If it is working well must I retrain?

No.  The golden rule is that if it's working then you should leave it as is.
I'm just warning that you'll see some really strange scores with such a huge
imbalance.  All testing has shown that training regimes like 'train on
error' (i.e. false positives, false negatives and unsures) do much better
than bulk training, and that generally smaller databases are more accurate
than large ones.

> Does Spambayes learn from experience or only from training?

If you mean does it do any automatic training, then no it does not.

=Tony.Meyer

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