Training the bayesian engine and sa-learn {Scanned by HJMS}

[Chris Lyon]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003 15:03:35 -0500, Furnish, Trever G <TGFurnish at HERFF-
JONES.COM> wrote:

>You're close - but sa-learn doesn't update whitelists or blacklists - it
>just trains the Bayesian filtering engine, which identifies patterns in
spam
>and uses them to recognize future spam.  SpamAssassin passes messages to
the
>Bayesian engine and gets a score for each message, just as it does for its
>other rules.  This score just becomes part of the cumulative score for the
>message.
>
>There's a FAQ entry on how to set up a script to automatically run sa-learn
>- sounds like you already found that.  If you have trouble getting it to
>work, ask for help again.
>

So it is just based on the content of the message. So, if something doesn't
look right in the message, give it to sa-learn and it will learn from that
e-mail.

>Besides the bayesian filtering, you can also whitelist and blacklist
senders
>but I would hesitate to recommend automating that process - I can imagine
>users blindly forwarding spam from the sobig virus to an address that would
>automatically blacklist the sender, which would be a bad thing since sobig
>is likely to come "from" someone who regularly emails you.
>
The issue that I am having is that I have a bunch of users 500+ that
forward spam or non-spam to e-mail accounts that needed to be manualy
processed. (Management choice unfortunately)

So, what if the user forwards a mail to an account to get that sender
whitelisted?



>HTH,
>Trever
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Chris Lyon [mailto:cslyon at NETSVCS.COM]
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 2:34 PM
>> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>> Subject: Training the bayesian engine and sa-learn {Scanned by HJMS}
>>
>>
>> So, I have been reading the FAQ and also the past posts but
>> have a little
>> confusion that I need to resolve. Just to give a little back
>> ground, I have
>> a lot of users who all have issues with e-mail that is being
>> marked as spam
>> or not being marked as spam. So, I think the answer to this
>> is to have them
>> forward the messages to an unattended mailbox that will
>> autowhitelist or
>> autoblacklist the sender.  Is that what sa-learn is all about?
>>
>>
>> So, if I create a spam and non-spam account on server and use
>> the sa-learn
>> to check the messages that my users forward to these
>> accounts, if something
>> was marked as spam and is not, further messages will not be
>> marked again?
>> Conversely, if I have a message that is spam but not marked,
>> I can forward
>> that to spam and it will be marked as spam the next message
>> that comes in
>> from that sender?
>>
>>
>> How does it work, based on content I would assume or does it
>> work by the
>> domain? Also, what happens with stuff being forwarded from
>> different mail
>> clients like outlook?
>>
>>
>> Can anybody shed some light on this one?
>>