[Spambayes] Randomized Spam Beating SpamBayes

[Shawn K. Hall]

Hi Skip,

> Any Windows users want to volunteer to do a thorough test of 
> 1.1a3 under Outlook?

I installed 1.1a3 a couple days ago on a new machine with Windows XP MCE
and Outlook 2003. I ported my existing Outlook settings from my old
Windows 2000 box, including 5 PST files (a couple are VERY large) but
NOT including my existing spambayes settings or database. I retrained
based on the stored messages in known good and known spam folders (the
known spam I built up from the previous 'release' version of SpamBayes
1.0.4).  The training reports 78311 good and 63373 spam.

This is the first time since installing spambayes (about 2 years ago?)
that spam is making it into my inbox several times per day. All of the
spam that makes it into my inbox is the gibberish crap spam that, I
believe, is intended to damage bayesian filters. Most messages are
determined to have a zero spam possibility percentile by SB, which until
about a month ago (even with SB 1.0.4) just never happened. My spam was
ALWAYS filtered right. Now, with these new gibberish spams I think
they're doing quite well at damaging the legitimacy of the database.

I don't see any setting to enable or disable scanning within images. Is
this something I have to setup manually? I'm willing to work on it and
beta test as needed. My email is very important to me (the core
communication system for my business), but it's all backed up on at
least 3 systems - so I'm not at risk of losing anything.

Regards,

Shawn K. Hall
http://12pointdesign.com/