[Spambayes] Spam at hackers conference

[Tim Peters]

[Skip Montanaro, on whitelists]
> I doubt it.  There is just too much email spoofing going on to trust any
> addresses that absolutely.  When using SA, I rarely used its whitelist
> facility, and only for odd email addresses whose automailings it always
> classified as spam.  For instance, I get a bit of mail from American
> Airlines letting me know when the airfare between Chicago and Albany
> changes.  As you might imagine, it's very spammy looking.

Yup, I get the same kind of thing from Expedia (what's up with that?  does
Microsoft own my soul too <wink>?), and it rated as solid spam before
training on it.  Now it's solid ham, in part because the specific routes it
always tells me about have become recognized as strong ham words.

> The only way I could convince SA to leave it alone was to whitelist it.
> With Spambayes, it's never a problem.

OTOH, I talk here about my sisters, and email from them is often brief, and
initially scored as Unsure.  I could whitelist them without problem.
They're not computer geeks, and one of them has never gotten spam:  she has
no web or mailing-list presence at all, and uses a small regional ISP.
Nobody is going to guess her address, unless they break into the ISP's
database.  If they do, then maybe a whitelist will dump a spam or two in my
Inbox.  BFD.

OTOH, after training on msgs from my sisters, my classifier also scores them
as ham now anyway.  I'm having more trouble when esmokes.com changes the
brands of cancer sticks on sale this week <wink>.