Return-Path: gward@python.net
Delivery-Date: Fri Sep  6 14:44:17 2002
From: gward@python.net (Greg Ward)
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 09:44:17 -0400
Subject: [Spambayes] test sets?
In-Reply-To: <LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCIEFEBCAB.tim.one@comcast.net>
References: <15735.50243.135743.32180@12-248-11-90.client.attbi.com>
	<LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCIEFEBCAB.tim.one@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20020906134417.GA16820@cthulhu.gerg.ca>

On 05 September 2002, Tim Peters said:
> Greg Ward is
> currently capturing a stream coming into python.org, and I hope we can get a
> more modern, and cleaner, test set out of that.

Not yet -- still working on the required config changes.  But I have a
cunning plan...

> But if that stream contains
> any private email, it may not be ethically possible to make that available.

It will!  Part of my cunning plan involves something like this:

  if folder == "accepted":             # ie. not suspected junk mail
      if (len(recipients) == 1 and
          recipients[0] in ("guido@python.org", "barry@python.org", ...)):
          folder = "personal"

If you (and Guido, Barry, et. al.) prefer, I could change that last
statement to "folder = None", so the mail won't be saved at all.  I
*might* also add a "and sender doesn't look like -bounce-*, -request,
-admin, ..." clause to that if statement.

> Can you think of anyplace to get a large, shareable ham sample apart from a
> public mailing list?  Everyone's eager to share their spam, but spam is so
> much alike in so many ways that's the easy half of the data collection
> problem.

I believe the SpamAssassin maintainers have a scheme whereby the corpus
of non-spam is distributed, ie. several people have bodies of non-spam
that they use for collectively evolving the SA score set.  If that
sounds vague, it matches my level of understanding.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <gward@python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction.
