False positives. iMail just helped me to delete a message containing a bunch of important information that I needed. No matter how diligently I try to train iMail, it’s pretty frequently wrong. This message was a note from a customer service center, not a friend or an email list, so I guess I’m not surprised that iMail thought it was spam. But because iMail dimmed out the message, my brain, on quasi auto-pilot, directed my hand to delete it along with the (I hope) junk messages. Grrrrr. Time to turn off the spam filter in iMail.
3 thoughts on “What's wrong with spam filters”
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Andrew Grumet's Weblog 
One trick I learned while starting to mess with procmail is to have it automatically archive all the messages I get in in a special mail.today folder BEFORE any spam filtering happens.
Then, I have my spam filter (crm114 – 99.95% accurate so far) process the message, and put all the spam it finds in a spam folder (which I check on a regular basis, but is set to automatically delete once I glanced at it).
The advantage is that if I noticed I’m deleteing something that I shouldn’t have, as it’s being deleted, I can always go to the mail.today and get it back.
Every night, the mail.today becomes mail.yesterday, so I’m always garenteed to have any message for at least 24 hours.
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You might want to try SpamSieve. I’ve found it works really well (I use Entourage rather than iMail, so your mileage might vary). It also puts emails it thinks are spam into a separate folder, so you can periodically inspect for false positives.
Ole
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Thanks for the suggestions. Having a backup sounds like a good idea.
Though I find real time, non-assisted management of spam to be annoying, I suspect it would be worse to push filtered spam into other folders. Wouldn’t these quickly accumulate unmanageably, like so much laundry on the floor of one’s bedroom? In that case the false positives get lost instead of accidentally deleted, or else mass-deleted when the number of messages becomes overwhelming.
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