On Wed, 9 Aug 2006 23:51:58 -0400 "Derek J. Balling" <deballing@vassar.edu> wrote:
On Aug 9, 2006, at 10:59 PM, Allan Poindexter wrote:
At LISA a couple of years ago a Microsoftie got up at the SPAM symposium and told of an experiment they did where they asked their hotmail users to identify their mail messages as spam or not.
<snip>
The recipient is
the only person who can determine these things.
Sure, but humans aren't perfectly accurate... Early tests with bayesian classifiers, on the false postive rate, tended to indicate that building a classifier with a lower false postive rate than the humans was pretty easy. Certainly my own experience is that I occassionaly tag things as junk, or mis-moderate messages to mailing lists. my own false postive rate is probably less than 1% spammassassain's is much lower than that. false negatives however are a reason I sitll have to tag things.
I'm gonna hold up the "I call bullshit" card here. Recipients most certainly *can* get it wrong.