[Mimedefang] AD/Commercial: Question

[David F. Skoll]

Mark wrote:

> Still, with SA present, which also does Bayes, and to which hundreds of
> volunteers contribute 'big evil' rule lists and such on a fairly regular
> basis, for free, I am but left to wonder: why I would use your paid
> product?

I don't want to get into too much advertising on the list, so I'm not
going to talk about CanIt (I did that off-list).  I just want to
clarify what we're thinking of offering: A Bayes implementation is
only as good as the data you feed it.  While our Bayes implementation
is somewhat better than SA's (we consider word pairs as well as
individual words), the real benefit we provide is an up-to-date
database of millions of tokens, voted on by actual people.  It's the
quality of our token database that really counts.  It lets you use
Bayes without having to go through a training period.  (I was skeptical
that it would work, because the conventional wisdom says that Bayes
databases need to be customized per user to be effective, but empirical
evidence is that conventional wisdom is wrong --- most people seem
to agree on what is spam.)

Regards,

David.