robbat2 | Return from honeymoon (Reply)

I have returned from my brief honeymoon. I'll write about it in more detail soon, but for now, a point outline only:

Fri Dec 1st - Travel and the Taxi driver who didn't know where the hotel was.
Sat Dec 2nd - In which we acquire bicycles.
Sun Dec 3rd - Waterfalls, lava tubes, and a close encounter of the paved kind.
Mon Dec 4th - Recuperation - ouch! everything hurts
Tue Dec 5th - Replacement bicycle, and exploring Hilo.
Wed Dec 6th - The finding and snorkelling of a mismanaged reef.
Thu Dec 7th - Boarding pass SSSS's & social engineering.

Email statistics
Here are statistics on new email that I recieved while I was away. This excludes all mailing-list email, which is not subject to spam filtering as the lists are extremely clear of spam, and my procmail rules shuffle the email into seperate folders quite fine. That would add another ~3000 non-spam emails into the count, but are not really relevant to spam categorization success rates.
I have my spam settings reasonably conservative, as I don't mind deleting spam that makes it through the filters, but false positives are a much larger concern.
total new messages: 2191
total spam: 1771
false positives: 1 (0.045% of total)
false negatives: 446 (20.3% of total, 25.2% of spam)
The false negatives are getting very interesting now. Random chunks of online documents, incl sentances from the document used as subjects, with an attached image as the actual spam, or cleverly merged HTML+CSS that would render the spam text over the other text. Two of them appeared to be chunks of the MySQL documentation.
The gentoo mail aliases like mysql-bugs@g.o appear to be very badly hit with spam, accounting for nearly 70% of the false negatives - this is also possibly because I have to trust the relaying of the Gentoo email servers, and cannot check the machine that the email came from.