Hello Joe, Friday, September 3, 2004, 7:01:12 AM, you wrote:
>> why do you need to alter the average scores of ham/spam? JF> What a horrible horrible mess if we can't! Sorry, I don't understand. JF> One example: JF> All of my users have set their "optimal" spam thresholds to some number JF> between 0.0 and 10.0. Good. Mine is set at 9.0 for all three domains I manage. JF> If the SA developers correctly shift around test scores, add new and/or JF> improved algorithms, etc., and I need to take advantage of the latest, JF> greatest technology and upgrade to the latest version of SA, then JF> without such a mechanism, all of my users' spam threshold settings (that JF> they had previously spent a lot of hopeful time setting) will be totally JF> off the mark and are all of a sudden likely to miss all kinds of JF> legitimate email messages! i.e., kill me! Why? It hasn't happened here. My requirements are that almost all non-spam message score below the threshold, and almost all spam messages score above the threshold. It happens, with 99.98% of all spam scoring above 9, and all ham but a handful a year scoring below 9. It's been that way, reliable and stable, through the conversion from 2.5x to 2.6x, where all sorts of rule scores got changed, and I expect it to continue working through the 2.6x to 3.0.x change, where the rule scores are changed. (I'm already mass-checking against 3.0.0, and have no problems.) I don't care whether my non-spam mean is 8, 5, 1, -1, or -20, as long as I continue getting fewer than 0.0001% false positives. I don't care whether my spam mean is 10, 15, 25, 50, or 100, as long as I maintain that 99.98% accuracy rate (and hopefully can improve on it). I don't care whether the mean of means is 5, 9, or 15, as long as the system works. I don't see why the mean of means would have any impact on this -- what I care about is the shape and distribution -- there should be (almost) no overlap at the 9.0 threshold. In my system there isn't. So I'm happy. Bob Menschel
