SpamAssassin Bayes filter and MailScanner

[Stephen Swaney]

Stephen Swaney
President
Fortress Systems Ltd.
Steve.Swaney at FSL.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf Of Mike McMullen
> Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 6:51 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: SpamAssassin Bayes filter and MailScanner
>
> > At 06:00 PM 2/16/2004, Mike McMullen wrote:
> >
> > >I fed about 1000 spam emails today to sa-learn. Watching the
> > >mail logs for MailScanner entries, I never see the Bayes Score
> > >show up.
> >
> > How many ham emails did you feed to sa-learn?
> >
> > Bayes will NOT activate without 500 spam and 500 ham messages, minimum.
> >
> > Also, beware that spam.assassin.prefs.conf makes mailscanner's
> > bayes_path  different
> >
> >          bayes_path                 /var/spool/spamassassin/bayes
> >
> > Thus, when you train, you need to train with an account that has that
> same
> > bayes path in it's user_prefs (ie: I do this with root).
> >
> > Also make sure that /var/spool/spamassassin exists as a directory.
> >
> > DO NOT make a subdirectory named "bayes" in there.
> >
>
> Matt, this is all good info. I have not fed it any ham mail. Now I see
> I'll have to do that.
>
> In my MailScanner.conf, the bayes_path is commented out. It is using
> /root/.spamassassin which is fine by me. I use root to do the training.
> I'm assuming that all the results are getting stored there and not just
> mail to root. Is this true?
>
> So if I feed about 500 - 1000 ham messages to sa-learn, bayes will kick
> in?

Actually this is configurable. From
http://www.spamassassin.org/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html

        bayes_min_ham_num (Default: 200)

        bayes_min_spam_num (Default: 200)

You can configure these settings by adding the to your
spam.assassin.prefs.conf file

Steve

The score threshold above which a mail has to score, to be fed into
SpamAssassin's learning systems automatically as a spam message. >
> If I have a large number of ham messages in mail folder created by
> Outlook Express, can I copy that to the server and then just feed it
> to sa-learn?
>
> I did that with sa-learn for the spam messages. sa-learn kicked back
> that it had read one message. Is that an appropriate respones? The
> bayes_toks database grew to about 2.75M so I assumed it did the
> right thing.
>
> Thanks for all your help on this,
>
> Mike
>
> --
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>
> Fortress Systems Ltd.
> www.fsl.com
>



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