Easy as Spam
Posted October 11th, 2003 @ 11:24pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Who in the hell opens messages that look like this? This is a screenshot of the subject column of my spam folder. If people didn't open spam - and worse yet - buy products advertised in spam - I wouldn't need a spam folder.
That having been said, I may not need a spam folder for long. SpamSieve's accuracy continues to climb - it's up to 99.5% right now. The stats:
1363 Good Messages 6164 Spam Messages (4.5:1) 34 False Positives 5 False Negatives 99.5% Correct
On September 26 my stats were 655/2317/25/3/99.1%. Perhaps I'll set SpamSieve to simply delete the messages it determines to be spam. It's simply disgusting to check my email in the morning and have 130 spams waiting.
Posted 12 Oct 2003 at 12:01am #
How do you reset the stats? It never changed over when I changed to 2.0, so the stats aren't accurate. They are rising though... It normally blocks 100-150 messages a day with a rare one creeping through.
Posted 12 Oct 2003 at 12:19am #
Jon,
In the bottom of the Statistics window, there's a "Show Statistics Since" setting. You can enter a date into that.
Posted 12 Oct 2003 at 12:28am #
SpamSieve is 98% accurate since September 10, 99.6% since October 1. So last week I edited the "Add to Spam" and "Move if Spam" scripts so spam is sent to the "Mail Trash" folder in PowerMail and marked as read. This saves me the extra step of emptying the "Spam" folder. I rarely look at the contents, since thanks to the Whitelist I know mail I care about won't be in there. The margin of error is still in the ocassional piece of junk that slips through into my inbox.
Posted 12 Oct 2003 at 11:49am #
Eric:
Thanks... That's a little weird on the UI part (used to pulldowns or something). Anyway, since October 1st it has 99.6% accuracy.
All of the false positives (just a few) were quasi spam anyway (press releases, mailing lists). Nothing I would have really missed. I think it's time to tell Mailsmith to delete the spam automatically.
Posted 12 Oct 2003 at 10:15pm #
Apple's Mail spam filter has worked quite well for me. More have been slipping through recently, as the messages are becoming a random assortment of numbers and letters. Although I'd think that doing that just makes it more clear to the human that it's spam.
- Scott