Re: Whitelist or BAYES?

Bill Cole <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 2024-09-30 at 16:22:49 UTC-0400 (Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:22:49 -0400)
joe a <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:

> On 9/27/2024 04:05:51, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:
>> On 26.09.24 10:27, joe a wrote:
>>> Maybe I should not ask this, but . . .
>>>
>>> A relatively innocuous member informational email from a local town 
>>> Library (monthly) gets marked as spam as shown below.
>>> The BAYES_99 and BAYES_999 values are something I am toying with for 
>>> other reasons.  Seems odd these should hit either one of those 
>>> tests.
>>>
>>> So, on the one hand I can add them to whitelist and be done with it, 
>>> or I can add
>>> them to missed HAM for re-learning.
>>>
>>> Which is the best approach?
>>
>> so far, both. You may need to relearn multiple their (monthly) mails 
>> before it has effect.
>>
>>> X-Spam-Report:
>>>     *  4.1 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 99 to 100%
>>>     *      [score: 1.0000]
>>>     *  5.0 BAYES_999 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 99.9 to 
>>> 100%
>>>     *      [score: 1.0000]
>>
>> You have raised BAYES_99 and BAYES_999 to huge values so I recommend 
>> to rethink that.
>>
> You some "don't because" examples?   Seems to me, off hand, that if 
> it's 99% or 99.9% then a high value does no harm.  Perhaps half what 
> I have would be sufficient though.

Bayes is a statistical method and so will always make some errors, as in 
this case. BY DEFINITION, one in a hundred messages hitting BAYES_99 
will be ham, as will one in a thousand that hits BAYES_999.

I can't claim that the default scores are the best possible ones, but 
they don't result in many false positive *final scores* for most people.



-- 
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com 
addresses)
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