[Spambayes] defaults vs. chi-square

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKEJEBLAB.tim.one@comcast.net>
             Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net> writes:
>[Tim]
>>> An odd thing is that you must have a lot of 'skip:z 70' (etc)
>>> tokens in your ham too, else these spamprobs wouldn't be so small.
>>>  Any idea where they come from?
>
>[T. Alexander Popiel]
>> I'm not sure offhand, either.  I'd have to work to track it down,
>> though... and as mentioned earlier, today is a lazy day.  My best
>> guess is a few base64 bits that didn't get decoded properly.
>
>I cater to lazy:  you had a bunch of them in the very spams you were talking
>about.  What does the source for those look like?  I *used* to get a bunch
>of these before we started stripping uuencoded sections, but that shouldn't
>be happening anymore -- unless the uuencode-finding regexp is missing a
>pattern that's common in your data but not in mine.  Or unless the message
>headers are damaged to such an extent that the email package barfs on them
>(in which case we fall back to the raw body text).

It appears to be a systematic error when a mailing list manager
appends plain text to what should be a base64 encoded segment.
Bad MLM, no biscuit.  This confuses the MIME decoder. Bad MIME
decoder, too!

As a sample:

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>Whatever the cause, if it's a systematic problem in your data, it will be
>for others too.  It may be unique to Perl programmers, though <wink>.

Nope.  In this case, it's Java programmers. ;-)

- Alex