BAYES issues

[Anthony Peacock]

Hi Jay,

Jay Chandler wrote:
> Still having trouble getting Bayes to work.
> 
> Followed the instructions at 
> http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:anti_spam:spamassassin:bayes:sql.  
> According to the below spamassassin lint, things SHOULD work perfectly.
> 
> Below is the spamassassin command as run from cron as the postfix user.  
> Why does it appear that the size of the Bayes database never changes 
> from the starter file I uploaded?  What should I be looking for in the 
> logs?
> 
> [51272] dbg: logger: adding facilities: all
> [51272] dbg: logger: logging level is DBG

<SNIP>

> [51272] dbg: check: 
> tests=BAYES_20,MISSING_SUBJECT,NO_RECEIVED,NO_RELAYS,TO_CC_NONE
> [51272] dbg: check: 
> subtests=__HAS_MSGID,__MSGID_OK_DIGITS,__MSGID_OK_HOST,__NONEMPTY_BODY,__SANE_MSGID,__SARE_WHITELIST_FLAG,__UNUSABLE_MSGID 

This message got a BAYES_20 score.  Your SA is using Bayes correctly.

Why don't you think it is working?

To change the size of the database you will need to make sure the Bayes 
system is learning new messages.  I would recommend that you do this 
manually to start with, using the sa-learn command:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/doc/sa-learn.html

Feed it as many examples of your site's ham and spam as possible.  Bayes 
is very sensitive to differences in 'types' of emails at sites, so a 
starter database may not be particularly relevant to your mail stream.

Once you have it scoring accurately you could turn on Bayes auto-learn, 
but if you are going to do this I would suggest adjusting the threshold 
values, these are the ones I use:

bayes_auto_learn_threshold_nonspam -0.1
bayes_auto_learn_threshold_spam 12.0

These are placed in SA's local.cf file.


-- 
Anthony Peacock
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"If you have an apple and I have  an apple and we  exchange apples
then you and I will still each have  one apple. But  if you have an
idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us
will have two ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw