Tip: Bayes check

[Denis Beauchemin]

  Hello all,

Yesterday I checked on my Bayes files and I found something weird: the 
bayes_seen file was way old (2 years) on most of my MS gateways. I could 
see Bayes scoring emails on all of them but somewhat was amiss.

I corrected the situation with the following commands:
# become the user that scans your emails in MS (root, postfix, etc)
cd .spamassassin/  # or wherever your Bayes files are located
ls -l bay*
# if any of your Bayes files don't have the same timestamp as the others 
(1-2 mins drift is ok if your server is mostly idle), then go ahead:
sa-learn --sync
mkdir backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)
cp bay* backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)
sa-learn --backup > backup.$(date +%Y%m%d).txt
sa-learn --clear
sa-learn --restore backup.$(date +%Y%m%d).txt
l bay*

I now have better working Bayes engines everywhere. I think what was 
happening was Bayes did not learn any new patterns (hence the unmodified 
bayes_seen file). Now it will be able to autolearn + learn from my 
manual corrections.

Hope this could help someone else.

Denis
PS: if you can afford it, it would be better to stop MS before 
reconstructing Bayes.

-- 
Denis Beauchemin, analyste
Université de Sherbrooke, S.T.I.
T: 819.821.8000x62252 F: 819.821.8045