Filtering and ignorelists

[Tom Anderson]

On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 05:04, michael at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> I rather than they say that if you do a bad job of training bogofilter,
> then you'll get silly results. Not too suprising really. :)

I assume by "bad job" you mean "inconsistent and not enough", and not a
lack of any special black magic.  To be usable, bogofilter must be able
to be trained like a puppy... reward good behavior, scold bad.
 
> X-Mailer: megaMailBlaster
> 
> Do you think that might be a hint about if the email is spam or not? :)

X-mailer: innocentMailClient

Is this?  Or how about:

User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3

The point is, these can be forged to appear as hammy as the sender
wants.  If they don't know how, then the rest of the message is going to
fail to get through the filter anyway.  Thus, net loss by including
them.
 
> If the purpose is to filter spam, you really want to give the program
> the best possible environment to operate in. And that means giving it
> all the information you have about the email, and let the algorithm
> decide what's important and what's not.

Then why ignore HTML comments?
 
> If someone is crazy enough to implement this I forcast an endless
> stream of newbies asking "Why is bogofilter performing so bad?"
> 
> Why would you deliberately add an option that makes it perform
> worse??

Ad hominem, begging the question, ad numerum, leading, straw-man.  Very
persuasive argument.

Tom

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