On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>Quite independently from testing and tuning the algorithm, I'd like to
>think about deployment.
>
>Eventually, individuals and postmasters should be able to download a
>spambayes software distribution, answer a few configuration questions
>about their mail setup, training and false positives, and install it
>as a filter.
>
>A more modest initial goal might be the production of a tool that can
>easily be used by individuals (since we're more likely to find
>individuals willing to risk this than postmasters).
My impression is that a pre-collected corpus would not fit most individuals
very well, but each individual (or group?) should collect their own corpus.
One problem that comes upp immediately: individuals are lazy.
If I currently get 50 spam and 50 ham a day, and I'll have to
press the 'delete' button once for each spam, I'll be happy
to press the 'spam' button instead.  However, if in addition
have to press a 'ham' button for each ham, it starts to look
much less like a win to me.  Add the time to install and setup
the whole machinery, and I'll just keep hitting delete.
The suggestions so far have been to hook something on the delete
action, that adds a message to the ham corpus.  I see two problems
with this: the ham will be a bit skewed; mail that I keep around
without deleting will not be counted.  Secondly, if I by force of
habit happen to press the 'delete' key instead of the 'spam' key,
I'll end up with spam in the ham, anyways.
I would like to look for a way to deal with spam in the ham.
The obvious thing to do is to trigger on the 'spam' button,
and at that time look for messages similar to the deleted one
in the ham corpus, and simply remove them.  To do this we
need a way to compare two word count histograms, to see
how similar they are.  Any ideas ?
Also, I personally would prefer to not see the spam at all.
If they get bounced (preferably already in the SMTP),
false positives become the senders problem, to rewrite
to remove the spam smell.
In a well tuned system then, there spam corpus will be much
smaller than the ham corpus, so it would be possible to be
slightly over-agressive when clearing potential spam from
the ham corpus.  This should make it easier to keep it clean.
Having a good way to remove spam from the ham corpus,
there's less need to worry about it getting there by mistake,
and we might as well simply add all messages to the ham corpus,
that didn't get deleted by the spam filtering.
It might also be useful to have a way to remove messages from
the spam corpus, in case of user ooops.
/Paul