[X4U] Make the Junk filter do a better job?

[Michael Tsai]

On Apr 18, 2008, at 1:40 PM, Randy B. Singer wrote:

> I'm more concerned that SpamSieve will automatically consider  
> messages with my e-mail address in them as bad.

It wouldn't do that unless the only messages from your address that  
you trained it with were spam.

>> I think these *are* failure notices. That is, someone sent a spam  
>> message with your address as the return address, and the message  
>> couldn't be delivered, so the failure notice came back to you.
>
> Nope.  They are clearly an odd sort of e-mail message to attack anti- 
> spam programs, not a spam spoof bounce.  I can tell by the fact that  
> they aren't selling anything in the body text, and that I only get  
> one or two a day, and they change every day within certain parameters.

I'm not convinced, but if you'd like to send me one (saved as Raw  
Message Source and then attached to an e-mail) I'd be interested to  
see an example of one of these.

> My experience hasn't been the same.  I've had some clients report  
> lately that they have abandoned SpamSieve, after several years of  
> use, because it had become less accurate.

Well, all I can say is that not many people report to me that it's  
become less accurate, and that when they do we can almost always get  
it back up to the proper level of accuracy.

The most common causes of accuracy problems are probably (a) a change  
in the user's mail rules such that SpamSieve is no longer being  
applied to all of the incoming messages, (b) spam messages that made  
it into the inbox and that the user had deleted outright rather than  
training as spam, and (c) the user had setup and trained SpamSieve  
several years ago, and they're now receiving different types of spam  
and good messages.

There's usually a simple solution if they contact technical support.  
And, if not, I'd certainly like to hear about new types of spam  
messages.

-- 
Michael Tsai                                 <http://c-command.com>