Return-Path: skip@pobox.com
Delivery-Date: Fri Sep  6 03:41:13 2002
From: skip@pobox.com (Skip Montanaro)
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 21:41:13 -0500
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: <15736.5577.157228.229200@12-248-11-90.client.attbi.com>


    Tim> I gave it all the thought it deserved <wink>.  It would be
    Tim> wonderful to get several people cranking on the same test data, and
    Tim> I'm all in favor of that.  OTOH, my Data/ subtree currently has
    Tim> more than 35,000 files slobbering over 134 million bytes -- even if
    Tim> I had a place to put that much stuff, I'm not sure my ISP would let
    Tim> me email it in one msg <wink>.

Do you have a dialup or something more modern <wink>?  134MB of messages
zipped would probably compress pretty well - under 50MB I'd guess with all
the similarity in the headers and such.  You could zip each of the 10 sets
individually and upload them somewhere.

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

How about random sampling lots of public mailing lists via gmane or
something similar, manually cleaning it (distributing that load over a
number of people) and then relying on your clever code and your rebalancing
script to help further cleanse it?  The "problem" with the ham is it tends
to be much more tied to one person (not just intimate, but unique) than the
spam.

I save all incoming email for ten days (gzipped mbox format) before it rolls
over and disappears.  At any one time I think I have about 8,000-10,000
messages.  Most of it isn't terribly personal (which I would cull before
passing along anyway) and much of it is machine-generated, so would be of
marginal use.  Finally, it's all ham-n-spam mixed together.  Do we call that
an omelette or a Denny's Grand Slam?

Skip
