From: Michael campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2004-04-20T08:46:27+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT: Mail reader for Unix]

Dan Doel wrote:

> I've also used Mozilla Thunderbird. It's coming along nicely. It looks
> pretty and has built-in junk-mail training (not so much a problem for your
> ruby-talk account, but more for other mail, if you use it for that). It's a
> little slower to start up, but I always keep it open anyways. It'll probably
> blend in with Gnome better as well.

Just as a data point, I've found Thunderbird's [allegedly] Bayesian spam 
filtering to be rather... bad.  It seems to have a time of learning, as to be 
expected, then it gets better for a bit, then for some reason just gets worse 
and worse.

I've gone back to POPFile (see sourceforge) as a proxy.  It never fails to get 
better over time, and at both my work and home accounts, it's in the 99+% 
range in accuracy.

For similar time periods, I could never get above 75% or so accuracy with 
T-bird.  A look at the forums there seems to indicate this is pretty widespread.

I don't know if they've implemented the Graham algorithm poorly, or the 
algorithm is just inherently flawed (some research (not by me) indicate it 
might be), but a vanilla bayesian formula works much much better.  YMMV, as is 
always the case with this sort of thing.

That said, I still use T-bird as a client, just not with its spam capabilities.