[Spambayes] Spam Software

[bill parducci]

> I've only been using your software for one day and it seems to have nailed
> all of my spam right away.  You've done a fabulous job with this.  Had one
> question.  After the software has been trained on all the messages in the
> Spam folder, is it ok to delete the contents of that folder each day?
> Thanks again for great product.

once a message has been [correctly] trained there is no need to keep it 
around. however, spambayes' accuracy is dependent upon having a 
'sufficient' sample from which to make its decisions. therefore, most 
users retain a fair amount of spam in the event that they may wish to 
rebuild the corpus from scratch.

of course, this begs the question: 'how much is enough?' that is where 
the 'art' of spambayes meets the science :) personally, i keep a couple 
thousand spam--two month's worth--as well as a similar number of ham. 
that is not to say that you won't have excellent results with a tenth 
(or less) of that number; since everyone's e-mail profile is different, 
the requirements for training are as well.

b