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Response to Gordon Cormack's Study of Spam Detection
Nuclear Elephant writes "In light of Gordon Cormack's Study of Spam Detection recently posted on Slashdot, I felt compelled to architect an appropriate response to Cormack's technical errors in testing which ultimately explain why one of the world's most accurate spam filters (CRM114) could possibly end up at the bottom of the list, underneath SpamAssassin. I spend some time explaining what is a correct test process and keep my grievances simplified about the shortcomings of Cormack's research."
1. Those bots that post goat.cx are very annoying. 2. The author of CRM114 admits that not everyone gets the results others do. Some people get perfect handling, while others get very poor handling. He also claims that setup might have been a problem with the testing. On one hand the tester should have set the system up correctly, but on the other hand this just shows that it isn't a fool-proof system (yet).
"Boo Hoo, my spam filter doesn't perform well in short simulations because it takes time into consideration. This guy tested incorrectly." Whatever. I use SpamAssasin company-wide, with 0 false positives and about 5-1 messages out of several thousand gettting through each day. Maybe this whiner's software's even better, but all I got from his article was that he's someone who I don't want to depend on for software support.
On the origional forum, I was saying something of the similair (except not nearly as well written!! hehe)
No, no, no. Let's be clear here. The article was not well written. It was well "architected" whetever the fuck that is.
I guess it's similar to the way in which I constructed this reply from precast concrete building components.
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