[Spambayes] Comments and Kudos

[Tony Meyer]

> Into my second day with the Outlook plug-in and I am VERY, 
> VERY impressed! This beats by far any commercial antispam 
> solution I have seen. Very few false negatives, and not a 
> single false positive yet.

Thanks - we're glad that it's helping you out.

> I am still getting a few messages moved to the Junk Suspects 
> folder (with scores in the 70% range) which I think Spambayes 
> should clearly be identifying as Spam by now on the basis of 
> the messages it's trained on.

Have you looked at the 'clues' for these messages?  It's usually quite
obvious from looking at them why messages score as they do.  Note also that
it's much better to have a roughly equal number of trained ham and spam.

> To get more of 
> these Suspects correctly identified as spam, I am wondering 
> whether I will get better results in the long run by fiddling 
> with my thresholds (moving the Junk threshold down to 70%, 
> say) or by patiently letting Spambayes refine its rules as I 
> continue to move the suspects into the Spam folder. Any 
> suggestions on this would be well appreciated.

It shouldn't be hard to get spambayes trained well enough that the default
thresholds work well - continuing to train spambayes is more likely to bring
you long term success, IMO.

> I added a Mark All As Read button to the Spambayes toolbar in 
> Outlook. This is very useful when reviewing the Junk folder 
> -- so much so that I was wondering whether the Spambayes 
> toolbar should not be designed with this button by default.

Holding down control and pressing 'a' then 'q' is pretty simple, too ;)
It's probably better if the toolbar is kept as simple as possible.  Thanks
for the suggestion, though.  Feel free to write up the method you used on
the spambayes wiki <http://entrian.com/sbwiki>, though, in case others are
interested.

> Incidentally, there is a bad link in the about.html file that 
> Spambayes installs in its program folder.
[...]

Thanks - this has already been fixed in the source and so will be correct in
the next release.

=Tony Meyer