Re: Paul Graham on fighting SPAM

[Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Maybe the folks over at comp.theory.info-retrieval know more about
> this?  There should be some experts hanging out there.

Hehe, thought about this as well.  After all, the new message was
considered to be spam, so spam-stat might as well learn about the new
words in it.  If the user then changes his mind, I have functions to
deal with that.  What do you say?  After all, the message is *already*
in mail.spam, so to answer "yes" means to learn as we go, let the user
change the scores if he wants; to answer "no" means that we only learn
after the user has confirmed the decisions spam-stat made.

If we were talking about a neural network, then there'd be the
question of overtraining, going of on tangents, and no way to undo
it.  But all spam-stat knows is "how often was this word in the good
and the bad mails?" and "how many good and bad mails are there?" --
that is easy to undo.  Lucky us.  :)

Alex.