Mail.app’s Junk filter is not a Bayesian one like the spam catching technology in SpamSieve and many other spam-fighting apps. Instead it uses a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).
I’ve blogged two excellent descriptions of the way this filter works in Apple Mail before, but today came across a third explanation with the imposing title, “Bayesian Nets, Latent Semantics, Despamming and other speculations”.
The post describes the differences between Bayesian and LSA and a whole lot more. It’s over two years old, but a good read and packed full of links to other resources on spam.
[via Paul's Time Sink.]
Tags:
Apple Mail,
Bayesian,
bayesian filtering,
junk filter,
latent semantic analysis,
lsa,
mail.app,
spam
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on Saturday, 24th December, 2005 at 2:44 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips.
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February 16th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
[...] ‘Mail.app’s Junk Filter is not like the others’ contains a number of links to explanations of LSA and how it differs from Bayesian filtering. [...]
July 29th, 2006 at 8:35 am
It’s a bit too latent in my opinion. I have several types of spam that keep coming back again and again a few days after I’ve tagged them as junk even though they still look the same.
I’d love to find an easy way to set up SpamAssassin on the Mac (I’m using MailServe, so it’s running as my mailserver as well), that’s thusfar pretty much the only thing I’ve found capable of keeping 99.9% of the spam out.