Bayes auto learn

James R. Stevens jstevens at ATHENSDISTRIBUTING.COM
Mon Jun 21 22:41:05 IST 2004


Does anyone have a script to extract the attachments and feed the rest
to sa-learn? I am using Outlook as an MUA.

...
Otherwise pretty much the only way to do bayes learning via forward
reliably for most mail clients is to set up a system where your users
forward the original email as an attachment. You can then write a little
script to extract the attachments and feed them to sa-learn.


-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Kettler [mailto:mkettler at EVI-INC.COM] 
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2004 4:14 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Bayes auto learn


At 05:00 PM 6/21/2004, James R. Stevens wrote:
>Hmmm... Got the info from here 
>http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/serve/cache/98.html
>Can you offer any way to accomplish my goal?
>
>Again, Forward missed Spam to a Linux mailbox. Have something to 
>distiguish beteen my organizations mail headers and feed the rest into 
>sa-learn.

To be honest with you, what you want to do is VERY difficult unless you
make a lot of assumptions about the MUA in use.

You're worried about fixing the headers... but what about the message
body? encoding formats? etc.

Even if you have a script that fixes the headers, Most email clients
completely re-encode the message body when you forward it, inserting
some things, removing others, and the resulting message bears little
resemblance to the original from a bayes perspective.

Some mail clients are good about this, but most are not.

If you've got a well behaved mailclient, you can use something like this
script that fixes headers to remove forwarding headers:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/BayesFeedbackViaForwarding?action=hi
ghlight&value=forward


Otherwise pretty much the only way to do bayes learning via forward
reliably for most mail clients is to set up a system where your users
forward the original email as an attachment. You can then write a little
script to extract the attachments and feed them to sa-learn.

(I for one can vouch that even forwarding as attachment won't work with
Eudora.. Eudora discards vital parts of multipart/alternative messages
and they cannot be recovered, ever.)

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