Re: GC, existed? the foreigner

[Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>]

In the last exciting episode, "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> "Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne@acm.org> wrote in message
> news:bu7i55$ema5s$1@ID-125932.news.uni-berlin.de...
>> If none of your _real_ email contains words like "egret," "beseech,"
>> or "shibboleth," then it certainly won't look like "ham."
>
> The initial description of Baysian filters included a rule that
> anything unrecognized was considered 10% chance of being spam. In
> that case, sticking any garbage into a message will help get it
> passed. I doubt that current filters work that way, but I don't know
> for sure.

Which paper provided evidence of the efficacity of that?  It seems
hard to find an "initial description"; the major papers seemed to
emerge in about 1998, and even at that point, they were primarily
writing about document _classification_, not "spam detection."

I contributed to the work on Ifile back in 1996/1997 (before 1998!),
and have been using Naive Bayesian filtering ever since; there is NO
such rule in the code I use, and I have never seen such a rule in the
scientific literature.

Actually, it doesn't even make sense to suggest such a rule.  Naive
Bayesian filters don't use random number generators to decide what to
do with mail; that "rule" can be of _no_ help in what is an entirely
deterministic classification process.
-- 
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