Re: Problems with Bayesian filtering

Laird Breyer wrote:
> On Feb 25 2004, Justin Mason wrote:
> 
> 
>>>IMHO, picking up explicitly on individual spammer tricks is at best a stop
>>>gap until a unified way of dealing with those is found.
>>
>>Could you expand on what you mean here?
> 
> 
> Fair request ;-)
> 
> There's a finite amount of information in a message. Part of that
> information conveys content, part conveys meta data such as display
> and formatting suggestions or other things. 
> 
> Bayesian filters generally try to pin down the content by measuring
> it against content that's been seen and classified before.
> They try to skip the meta data, because the latter doesn't convey 
> useful information.

And that final sentence is a mistake.  Looking at the meta data helps 
greatly in correctly filtering messages.  Very often the meta data is 
one of the best indicators of spamminess.  I believe it was Paul Graham 
who pointed out long ago that the color #FF0000 was a great spam 
indicator for him.

John.