Re: [OFFTOPIC] spam scoring (was: *****SPAM***** Extracting a KeySym from an action routine)

On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 11:26:35AM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
>Around 14 o'clock on Nov 26, David Dawes wrote:
>
>> All I can really say so far without having analysed the data is that
>> the number of false positives has been relatively small compared to the
>> number of valid positives.  I need to assess now many valid positives
>> were attributable to the RBL matching before coming to any conclusions
>> about that.
>
>However, the false negative rate for xpert has been surprisingly high, 
>compared to the results I've seen with spamassassin here at home.  High
>enough to prevent me from automatically forwarding messages not tagged as 
>spam sent by non-subscribers.

When I looked at the alternatives for our private lists earlier in the
year, I found that spamassassin's performance was mixed for the type of
traffic our lists were getting.  That's why I'm using something else
there.  I haven't yet evaluated how well it has peformed for the xpert
list traffic.

>There have been several spam detector papers submitted to this years 
>Usenix conference; I'm pretty confident that we'll have better tools 
>available in the next couple of months.

I've seen that there are different "spam" profiles for personal email
and different types of mailing lists, and that those profiles are a
constantly moving target.  Those papers should be interesting.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/Architect                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes