Urgh

I spent yesterday with a feeling weak with aches all over. I work at the top of a four storey building. I normally run up the stairs... yesterday, it was a struggle walking up at one point.

So I wasn't surprised when yesterday evening I developed a high temperature, went to bed early, and have only just properly got out of bed.

Yep, it looks like I've caught what Jo Anna had throughout last week. A high temperature (although it seems to be under control with paracetamol), a mild sore throat (she was denying having one, although she would clutch her throat from time to time), muscle aches and not much else in the way of symptoms.

Is this familiar to anyone else?

The lesser or greater of two evils?

I use POPFile to help sort my email. It looks at the words used within each email and uses Bayes Theorem to classify it into the categories I've chosen according to what I've taught it.

After a day or two, it achieves over 99.5% accuracy (less than one in two hundred emails needs any corrective action from me) so I was rather surprised when an email offering me 'generic viagra' was in my main inbox just now.

Hmm, look at the header to see what POPFile thinks it is... 'unclassified'??

Open POPFile's control panel to see why... Ah ha!

definitely_spam 0.508370
probable_spam 0.491630

It couldn't decide whether it was 'definitely spam' (deleted on sight by my email program) with slightly more than 50% chance, or just 'probably spam' (stuck in a folder for possible later examination) with slightly less than 50%!

(no subject)

That has prompted me to see what sort of email I'm getting across several accounts... I currently get POPFile to chose between six 'buckets', with other filtering done by my email program (which sorts according to which email list, for example)

In the four months since I last reset the statistics, I've had slightly more than 20,000 emails.

Just 277 (1.37%) have been classified as "ok", that is mostly 'real people'.

4,647 (23.09%) were "mailing_list".

1,679 (8.34%) were Transport for London "travel" bulletins.

564 (2.80%) were "commercial", ads / newsletters from firms I'm ok with sending me email.

That leaves 11,177 (55.54%) and 1,778 (8.83%) which were "definitely" or "probably" spam.

Interestingly, the "ok" emails account for over 17% of the words that I've been emailed. So you might not email me as often as spammers, but you say more when you do :)

(Lots of spam is 'look at this graphic' and anyone sensible has automatic display of graphics turned off).