UI for correcting mistakes

[Greg Louis]

On 20030314 (Fri) at 0805:36 -0500, David Relson wrote:
> At 07:49 AM 3/14/03, Greg Louis wrote:
> >My power users bounce their spam (Eudora calls it "redirect" IIRC) --
> >at first they regularly forwarded it, but they started to turn up as
> >senders of messages that became false positives.  Since they switched
> >to bouncing we haven't seen that problem recur.
> 
> Since I love to speculate, I bet that a relevant factor is "train on 
> errors" instead of "auto-update ('-u')".  If you used -u, all your users 
> would be well represented in the good wordlist.

You do remember that I advocate not switching to train-on-error (which
includes the roughly 15% of unsures) until you've got about 10,000
spams and 10,000 nonspams in the training db, and that this is the path
I followed (more or less -- I was a bit short of nonspams)?  Well, the
forwarding started while I was still training on everything (without
the risky -u thing, though ;-) and continued into the early
train-on-error days.  I was surprised when the false positives started
showing up, precisely because there were at least several hundred
messages in the training db from these power users (who tend to be, if
not garrulous or loquacious, at least assiduous emailers :)

So you had a good point but it's not the explanation in my case... I
incline to the suspicion that "Fwd:" started to get too high a count
on the spam side.  To confirm that I'd have to go back and see if the
fp's were in fact valid forwarded messages -- something I didn't think
to check at the time.

-- 
| G r e g  L o u i s          | gpg public key: finger     |
|   http://www.bgl.nu/~glouis |   glouis at consultronics.com |
| http://wecanstopspam.org in signatures fights junk email |