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Old 10 Nov 2018, 02:42 AM   #20
jhollington
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
That’s a great post! The only thing I might add concerning the personal Bayes system is that you should also add some ham (non-spam) to your personal Bates database. Manually reporting false spam positives using the “Not spam” button (as described above) is critical, since you want to train the Bates database correctly when a message is improperly classified as spam. But you also need other good messages for the Bayes database. For example, you need at least 200 non-spam reported to initially enable the personal Bayes filter to be activated. So be sure that the Archive folder is set to train as non-spam. I also use some folders with filing rules which insure that only ham reach those folders.
Thanks

I also keep the Archive folder marked to learn "not spam" but I don't think that's necessary either unless you're using an IMAP client (and maybe not even then). According to Fastmail's page on Improving spam protection (emphasis mine):

Quote:
Everybody's spam is different. When you report spam that's slipped through our filters, or non-spam that we've mistakenly classified, we feed this information into a database that's tuned just for you. We also automatically train this with spam you've deleted permanently from your spam folder, and non-spam you've moved to your Archive folder or replied to.
So it appears that anything that's moved to the archive folder is automatically trained as non-spam, although it's less clear if this is the case when archiving messages in an IMAP client .... I know somebody from Fastmail once said that messages deleted from the spam folder in an IMAP client aren't learned as spam, so I wouldn't be surprised if IMAP moves don't get tracked in the same way either, as it's probably something tied into the web client actions on the front-end rather than monitoring changes in the back-end message store.

I also have a "HAM" folder on my account with a seven-day purge for training non-spam that I don't otherwise want to keep. Things like newsletters and notifications —*which I still want to land in my inbox but usually delete after reading —*get dropped into the "HAM" folder, where they'll be learned as non-spam and then automatically deleted afterward.
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