Re: apple mail better than SA?

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

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Matthew.van.Eerde@hbinc.com writes:
> Simon Butler wrote:
> > read this link for more info on apple mail spam filtering
> > 
> > http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/18/spam_pt2.html
> 
> Sounds like per-user Bayes to me.

Pretty similar, alright.  It's another probabilistic classifier, like our
BAYES_* rules.  It uses a fancier algorithm (LSA), but research hasn't
really proven if that helps in real-world use; some reviews have said our
results are better, some say Apple's are. All I know is that SpamAssassin
requires no upfront hand-training ;)

To answer the original question, the easiest way to get SpamAssassin's
accuracy to the same levels is to chain the classifiers; keep copies of
all the mails Apple's app says are ham and spam, separately, then feed
those to sa-learn.

You may need to do some hand-classification if Apple's classifier makes
mistakes, of course.  No point training SpamAssassin with incorrect
data.

- --j.
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Re: apple mail better than SA?

[Vivek Khera <vi...@khera.org>]

On Nov 15, 2005, at 2:51 PM, Justin Mason wrote:

> You may need to do some hand-classification if Apple's classifier  
> makes
> mistakes, of course.  No point training SpamAssassin with incorrect
> data.

The main problem with Apple's Mail.app is that you can't tell it NOT  
to learn from some folders, such as my spamassin users list folder,  
or my spam-l folder.  It learns it all, which makes for difficult  
filtering of real spam as opposed to discussion about spam.

I had to turn it off.

Re: apple mail better than SA?

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@apache.org>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:51:34AM -0800, Justin Mason wrote:
> Pretty similar, alright.  It's another probabilistic classifier, like our
> BAYES_* rules.  It uses a fancier algorithm (LSA), but research hasn't
> really proven if that helps in real-world use; some reviews have said our
> results are better, some say Apple's are. All I know is that SpamAssassin
> requires no upfront hand-training ;)

It also depends on use I'd say.  A previous mail was saying that the
MUA was catching everything that SA let through.  So the MUA gets to
focus on only catching a certain class of mails.  If it had to try
catching everything, it may not function so well.  (my apple mail still
misses a bunch of spam that also misses SA, and I generally haven't
been impressed.)

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