Have you tried the suggestions in http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/faq.html#the-recover-from-spam-button-no-longer-appears?
As for training, the recommended (simplest and typically
most effective) approach is the obvious one: when SpamBayes puts something in
the Unsure folder or misclassifies a message (thinks it's spam when it's not or
vice versa), use the "Delete as Spam" or "Recover as Spam" button as appropriate
to train SpamBayes. People typically find that classification improves
rapidly; training on ten or so messages often leads to good results. If you're
not getting good results, it may be worth discarding the training database and
starting over.
There's no way to tell SpamBayes that certain words only
occur in spam. The process of scoring messages as ham or spam works by
looking at how often the words in a message appear in other messages that you
have indicated are spam and/or ham. This tends to work better than simple
black-and-white filtering. For instance, to use your example, if a friend writes
to tell that she's buying a house and looking for a recommendation for bank to
get a mortgage from, filtering only on mortgage would mean that message is
discarded. SpamBayes would look at every word in the message, and if you've done
a good job of training, it would probably decide that the message is not spam.
Another example: I get lots of messages discussing Cialis, meds, mortgages, etc,
and the spam is almost all correctly classified as such, but your message got
through, because SpamBayes was able to determine that the despite the presence
of these "spammy" terms, your message actually wasn't spam. (That's pretty cool,
when you think about it!)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of M. Anne Clark
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 12:56 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Spambayes] IMPORTANT QUESTIONWhy did my tool bar items for SpamBayes disappear?IS there a way to HELP train mine? It sure isn't learning very well.For example; Is there a way to give it certain words like Cialis, meds, mortgage, etc. so it dumps anything containing those into the Junk folder?!(I can't find answers to those ?s in your FAQ, AND I'm not familiar with all the software jargon, either. A simple answer would be most appreciated.)Anne Zoe Clark - WRITER & AUTHOR!Rev. M. Anne ClarkWedding of SoulsOfficiant for Weddings in VT and NHSuper Annie, American Nanny...for peaceful parenting!
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