False Positives (Non-spam Marked As Spam)


No classifier is perfect; even humans get it wrong

False Positives (non-spam marked as spam) are much worse than spam getting through; much more inconvenient to user

SpamAssassin is 98% accurate on our test corpora: 0.4% false positives, 87% of all spam caught correctly

Highest rate available among present tools

Reduce FPs by increasing the threshold, ditto vice-versa