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I have some history with Naive Bayes for email filtering[1][2] and it doesn't surprise me that it's still a viable technique. It's incredibly fast to execute an

I have some history with Naive Bayes for email filtering[1][2] and it doesn't surprise me that it's still a viable technique. It's incredibly fast to execute and for spam it was fascinating to see that as spammers tried to evade Naive Bayes they were actually increasing the numbers of tokens that made their spam look like spam. And it generalized to multiple categories. To this day I receive messages from people saying they are using POPFile for multi-category email filtering. As I pointed out in 2004[3], one technique around Naive Bayes (and other machine learning systems) was to pit machine learning against machine learning[4]. [1] https://getpopfile.org/ https://getpopfile.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POPFile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POPFile [3] https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/how-to-beat-adaptivebayesian-spam.html https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/how-to-beat-adaptivebayesian-sp... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_machine_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_machine_learning

fishywang 3y ago
Had been using popfile for years before gmail and it had always been great. I think that's also my earliest encounter with the conception of "local web ui", while everything else at the time needs some this for configurations. It's also truly cross platform as it's written in perl.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  I remember someone saying to me in about 2005 that the "true genius" of the UI was that it had a localhost web UI. I did that because I wanted it to be cross-platform and I didn't want to use Tk or something. It just seemed natural that apss would use the web browser for configuration. And yeah, I used Perl and me (and others) worked hard to make sure it coped with all sorts of platforms.
- fishywang 3y ago
  s/this/gui/, sometimes gboard makes bizarre auto corrections.
pixl97 3y ago
Yea, I remember using Bayes filtering back in the early 2000s and it was very effective. Pretty sure it was in the SpamAssassin perl application. One thing we saw that was more problematic is spams getting shorter and the use of image only spam. Turns out a lot of human to human communications is just short single sentence blurbs between people. We saw a lot of junk spam that didn't really have a call for action, but seemed to exist just for the purpose of making Bayes classification more difficult and error prone.

fishywang 3y ago

Had been using popfile for years before gmail and it had always been great. I think that's also my earliest encounter with the conception of "local web ui", while everything else at the time needs some this for configurations. It's also truly cross platform as it's written in perl.

jgrahamc 3y ago
I remember someone saying to me in about 2005 that the "true genius" of the UI was that it had a localhost web UI. I did that because I wanted it to be cross-platform and I didn't want to use Tk or something. It just seemed natural that apss would use the web browser for configuration. And yeah, I used Perl and me (and others) worked hard to make sure it coped with all sorts of platforms.
fishywang 3y ago
s/this/gui/, sometimes gboard makes bizarre auto corrections.

pixl97 3y ago

Yea, I remember using Bayes filtering back in the early 2000s and it was very effective. Pretty sure it was in the SpamAssassin perl application. One thing we saw that was more problematic is spams getting shorter and the use of image only spam. Turns out a lot of human to human communications is just short single sentence blurbs between people. We saw a lot of junk spam that didn't really have a call for action, but seemed to exist just for the purpose of making Bayes classification more difficult and error prone.