[Spambayes] Does SpamBayes support automatic selective training?

[David Abrahams]

on Thu Jan 03 2008, "Jesse Pelton" <jsp-AT-PKC.com> wrote:

> Do you have reason to believe that incremental training on messages that
> you're currently receiving would be ineffective?  I retrain from scratch
> periodically, and I generally find that a remarkably small corpus (maybe
> a total of couple of dozen messages trained) is effective.  I retrain in
> part because I suspect that the content of spam that I receive changes
> over time, so training performed on messages from the distant past (say,
> six months ago) may be irrelevant or worse for my current message
> stream.
>
> One of the counter-intuitive things about SpamBayes is how little data
> it needs to go on.  This makes retraining fast, easy, and (for me, at
> least) perversely rewarding.

Sorry if this sounds combative; I'm really just trying to understand.

What makes you decide to retrain, if it's working so well?  Do you
just do it prophylactically, like brushing your teeth?  If so, then
you probably don't see it improving things much (like brushing your
teeth).  In that case, what makes it rewarding?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com