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Bayesian filtering or any other heuristics comes at a price of occasionally loosing important messages, no matter how good those methods could be in reducing sp
by mojuba 20y ago
Bayesian filtering or any other heuristics comes at a price of occasionally loosing important messages, no matter how good those methods could be in reducing spam.
And to my understanding, the best method so far is the statistical (voting-based) method that many large email servers run.
And there is one philosophical problem that TLB doesn't mention: we ourselves haven't figured out yet what exactly is spam. Is there a good universal definition of unwanted mail that should be filtered unconditionally?
- brett 20y agoAnd to my understanding, the best method so far is the statistical (voting-based) method that many large email servers run. That's Bayesian filtering. http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html As to your last point, I know what I consider spam. That's all that is important to me. That's part of the whole point of Bayesian filtering. Each user can personally teach the filter.
- mojuba 20y agoVoting is not Bayesian filtering. Not everything is Bayesian filtering in this world. And yes, I read that article. Self-learning algorithms suck, because they are not intelligent. Even if you had a human spam filter and you had to teach him/her what's important for you, even that kind of filter would give you false positives from time to time. The whole Bayesian filtering business was doomed to failure for very obvious reasons.