> > Note that header names are case insensitive, so this one's no
> > different than "MIME-Version:".  Similarly other headers in your list.
>
> Ignoring case here may or may not help; that's for experiment to decide.
> It's plausible that case is significant, if, e.g., a particular spam mailing
> package generates unusual case, or a particular clueless spammer
> misconfigures his package.
I found it made no difference for my testing.
> The brilliance of Anthony's "just count them" scheme is that it requires no
> thought, so can't be fooled <wink>.  Header lines that are evenly
> distributed across spam and ham will turn out to be worthless indicators
> (prob near 0.5), so do no harm.
zactly. I started off doing clever clever things, and, as always with
this stuff, found that stupid with a rock beats smart with scissors,
every time.
--
Anthony Baxter     <anthony@interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

> Looks like your ham corpus by and large has To: jeremy@alum.mit.edu in
> a header while your spam corpus by and large doesn't.  But this one
> does.
Interestingly, for me, one of the highest value spam indicators was
the name of the mail host that the spam was delivered to, in the To:
line. So mail to info@gin.elax2.ekorp.com was pretty much a dead cert
for the filters.
--
Anthony Baxter     <anthony@interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

> course, it instantly picked up on 'received:2001' as a non-ham.

There seem to be two "drivers" for the classifier now: Neale Pickett's
hammie.py, and the original GBayes.py.  According to the README.txt,
GBayes.py hasn't been kept up to date.  Is there anything in there
that isn't covered by hammie.py?  About the only useful feature of
GBayes.py that hammie.py doesn't (yet) copy is -u, which calculates
spamness for an entire mailbox.  This feature can easily be copied
into hammie.py.  (GBayes.py also has a large collection of tokenizers;
but timtoken.py rules, so I'm not sure how interesting that is now.)
Therefore I propose to nuke GBayes.py, after adding a -u feature.
Anyone against?  (I imagine that Skip or Barry might have a stake in
GBayes.py; Tim seems to have moved all code he's working to other
modules.)
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)