Bayesian Whitelisting: Finding the Good Mail Among the Spam
Posted by Eric Sun, 29 Sep 2002 04:00:00 GMT
The biggest challenge with spam filtering is reducing false
positives--that is, finding the good mail among the spam. Even the
best spam filters occasionally mistake legitimate e-mail for spam. For
example, in some recent
tests, bogofilter
processed 18,000 e-mails with only 34 false positives. Unfortunately,
several of these false positives were urgent e-mails from former
clients. This unpleasant mistake wasn't necessary--the most important
of these false positives could have been avoided with an automatic
whitelisting system.
