Few spam related questions

[Mark Nienberg]

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Jason Williams wrote:

> Hello everyone! just wanted to ask a few spam related questions in 
> regards to MS and plugins.
>
> 1.) Anybody having problems with pyzor? lately, mine has been timing 
> out. I can 'discover' fine, but timeout when I ping.

Pyzor seems to be working fine for me.  I am not seeing any spamassassin 
timeouts and I see Pyzor scores in the logs.

>
> 2.) Been working with Bayes a lot lately and have a question about the 
> following entry in spam.assassin.prefs.conf
>
>
> # Bump up SpamAssassin scores on the high and low end
> # score BAYES_00 -15.0
> # score BAYES_05 -5.0
> # score BAYES_95 5.0
> # score BAYES_99 15.0
>
>
> Those are currently commented out, but i'd like to use them if possible.
> Anyone have recommendations on how to set this? Personal preference? 
> I'd like to get bayes working as best as I can. Wasn't quite sure on 
> the best way to utilizie this part.

Personally, I bump up the scores for positive bayes tests but I flatten 
the scores for the negative tests.  I've seen too many examples of 
messages that trigger low bayes tests and then receive a negative score 
that cancels out the other spam scores.  In my experience, I have never 
seen a legitimate message score so high on other tests that it would 
require a -15 from bayes in order to avoid being tagged as spam.  This 
may be quite  different for other sites, so you really have to study 
some messages and stats for a while to see what works for you.  Here are 
my current values:
score BAYES_00  -1.00
score BAYES_05  -0.75
score BAYES_20  -0.50
score BAYES_40  -0.25
score BAYES_60  2.00
score BAYES_80  2.50
score BAYES_95  4.00
score BAYES_99  6.00

-- 
Mark Nienberg, SE
Tipping Mar + associates
1906 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 549-1906 ext 236
http://www.tippingmar.com

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