[Spambayes] spambayes not learning

[Skip Montanaro]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 12:21 PM,  <BCash at guesswho.com> wrote:
> Hello,  I am trouble shooting an issue for the CEO of my company.  There is
> an email domain that keeps getting flagged in the junk suspects folder.  we
> keep clicking on “not junk” and it will release the email, but everytime
> they send again they keep going to junk suspects.  I wanted to reset
> spambays and have it re-learn or uninstall and reinstall but I have been
> told this is not an option as there is too much for it to re-learn.  This is
> an XP system sp3 running outlook 2010.  Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.

Not sure where the "too much for it to re-learn" opinion comes from.
As I indicated in an earlier message today, training on every message
is almost certainly not what you want to do. In this case, it may very
well be that someone somewhere along the way misclassified mail from
this source as spam. If so, you are now paying the price for that
mistake, as it generally takes a fair bit of effort to overcome such
mistakes. When I was actively still working on SpamBayes, discarding
my training database and starting over was something I did with some
regularity (I would guess at least once a month) as the version of
SpamBayes I was using changed.

I was never an Outlook user, so I'm not quite sure of the proper
protocol in that interface, but my advice would be to empty the
training database, then classify the next group of messages (five to
10) that arrive and land in the unsure pile. That should be enough to
get SpamBayes pointed in the right direction. I wouldn't bother
training on any mails other than those which are misclassified or
those that wind up in the unsure pile.

If you really want Outlook to whitelist mail from a specific set of
email addresses or domains, I'm pretty sure it allows you to do that.
In that case, Outlook would in effect be saying that it knows better
than SpamBayes. Which it might well. There might be mail which is too
important to trust to a spam filter. Such as mail from your wife. :-)

Skip