Re: Warning: Trolling for Dollars, Scammers hard at work {was: forged Failure Notice}

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Norman Bauman  on Thu, 17 Jul 2003
10:59:49 -0400


> Incidentally, because you included the phrase "Failure Notice" in the
> heading, my Eudora filter sent your message to my "Bounced Mail" folder.

May I infer that the Eudora filter has a set of "hard" criteria for
distinguishing real Email from spam? Bayesian filters are more sophisticated,
and worth investigating. Bayesian analyzes the Email by picking the 15 or so
"most interesting/unusual" words in the Email. It then compares this msg with
a fairly large, personal corpus of (maybe 200+) Emails that you, the user, have
read and declared to be either good or bad, and makes a determination. Thus,
what is a "bad" message to you might be a "good" msg to a pedophile miscreant
-- it's completely individualized. It takes a few days to build up your
good/bad corpus, but once you've done so, the Bayesian filter almost never
makes a mistake. I mean, I really am getting 100-150 spams/day, believe it or
not, and the last time my filter made a mistake was, well, sometime last month.
The mistake itself, after being manually re-marked as "bad" (or "good", as the
case may be) adds to the intelligence of the filter: it won't make the same
mistake, or one like it, again.

In Polarbar v1.25a

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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