Re: [SLUG] spamassassin vs pine

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Wed Dec 14 2005 - 17:10:41 EST


On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 12:01:19PM -0500, Eben King wrote:

> I put Spamassassin on my machine to deal with the spam issue (which is not
> severe, by "abuse@" standards, but still), and it doesn't seem to be getting
> beter. Correction, the two-week average of "% spams caught" has gone from
> 38% two weeks ago to 44% now. There have been no false positives, for which
> I'm grateful, but I'd put up with a few false positives for a better kill
> rate. I got fed up with it, so I made a spreadsheet to see _how bad_ it
> was. It's at http://24.94.123.65:81/spam.xls . I've fed every missed spam
> to it by "| sa-learn --spam" from pine. What am I doing wrong? Shouldn't
> it be improving?

As mentioned elsewhere, you must train it on _both_ spam and ham. And
there's a lower limit below which it won't make any difference. But let
me make a point here about Bayesian spam filtering. Your spam/ham
database will grow until it takes over the whole internet! ;-}
Seriously, every time you feed it a spam/ham to learn from, the database
will grow. I've had a bogofilter file up to 18M before (of course, I get
500-600 emails a day, 95% of which is spam). If you think that doesn't
slow things down, you're wrong. This is why I started writing my own
procmail spam recipes, in addition to using SpamAssassin (without its
bayesian capabilities).

Paul
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