Everything is spam?

m4gician · Cadet Joined: Jun 01, 2004 Posts: 2 Location: Uk

I have been using Mailwasher for a while now but recently it has developed a fault. Every email is listed as "Probable spam" or "known Spam" even when I know who is sending it. I want to teach MW to automatically bounce and delete known spam or probable spam but that's dangerous now because it thinks *everything* is spam. Also, in the 'Learning' column, only the envelope is visibale and the bin has disappeared.

If anyone can help me get back to normal, it would be mucha appreciated.

M4gician

rogerw · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 11:26 am Post subject:

Sounds like you really don't have an appreciation of what the Bayesian (learning) filters can do for you and how they work.

From your description, you've 'trained' the feature with a great number of 'junk' emails and not enough 'legitiamte' emails so that MW is tending to score everything as 'junk'.

If you turn the learning feature off, you'll get back the prior functionality. To turn it off, navigate Tools>Options>Learning then unset the Checkboxes on each of the 3 property sheets there.

Once the feature is off, you can read up on the Bayesian to see how it works and if you want to try using it later.

m4gician · Cadet Joined: Jun 01, 2004 Posts: 2 Location: Uk

The learning feature was fine and I was teaching it well but then it went haywire a week or so ago. Is it simply a case of training it with too many junk emails?

Do you happen to know why the dustbin icon has vanished from the learning column, leaving only the envelope?

Ikeb · Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2004 9:38 am Post subject:

I had a similar thing happen but admittedly not the same implications. In my case, after several weeks of good Learning Spam Tool (LST) performance, for over a week most msgs were being left as "Unknown". I just kept training the LST and it is now behaving itself.

The 'envelope' (on my screen and with my poor eyesight I can't even make out the symbol) signifies an opportunity to "train" the LST to consider the msg as Legit. That the "trashbin" is missing indicates that the msg is currently considered Junk already and there's no need to train as Junk.

rogerw · Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2004 10:34 am Post subject:

stan_qaz · Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2004 11:34 am Post subject:

You might have a file corruption problem too, close MW and delete the training.dat file, MW will recreate it next time you start up.

If that doesn't help try deleting all the training files and start over.

stapel · Trooper Joined: Apr 23, 2004 Posts: 19 Location: USA

I've had periodic problems with Mailwasher 4.1 suddenly marking obvious spam as "Probably Legitimate" (even if it is letter-for-letter the same as another message marked "Known Spam"), or not marking the "Known Spam" for blacklisting and deletion. But when I delete the Mailwasher "Training" files, this seems to reset Mailwasher to sensible behavior for another couple weeks. So try deleting the "Training" files and see if this helps.

Just my $0.02.

Eliz.

AlphaCentauri · Captain Joined: Nov 20, 2003 Posts: 302 Location: USA

rogerw · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 3:01 pm Post subject:

stan_qaz · Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 10:13 am Post subject:

I just train anything that isn't classified and retrain anything that is misclassified with very good results.

Haven't had a misclassification in some time now.


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