Training SpamAssassin

[Aaron Konstam]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 07:14:05PM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2003, "Neil B. Cohen" <nbc at aikisoft.com> wrote:
> 
> > I have installed SpamAssassin on my mail server and it works very well.
> > But it is still picking up only 50-60% of the junk delivered to my
> > mailbox. So recently I started saving the junk that gets through into a
> > SPAM folder and then I tried running
> 
> > sa-learn --spam --file spambox
> 
> > on that folder. I had 250+ messages in the folder, but when it finishes,
> > it says something like "Learned from 1 message".
> 
> If it's an mbox file, use --mbox, not --file.  --file is for one
> message in a file.
> 
> > 2) Can I expect to get SpamAssassin to get up to the point of getting
> > rid of 90% or 95% of the junk that crosses the Net these days?
> 
> It does for me, but it's very important that you train it not only
> with spam, but also with good e-mail, otherwise you may skew the
> results or not even have enough data for it to kick in.
> 
Fedora has a version od spamassasin that supports learning so that is
ok. However in the .spamassassin file in you home directory you can set
a level of spam stuff that is identified before spamassassin rules it
is genuine spam. The defaut that come with the software is 5 and is too
low. 5.5 is better. Thye higher the number the less spam will be
identified. Spamassassin just identifies the spam by putting something
like [SPAM} in the header. You need to use something like procmail to
remove it from your mail automajically.
A procmailrc like this:
PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/global/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/local/bin:
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILDIR =       $HOME/Mail      # You'd better make sure it exists
#LOGFILE =       $MAILDIR/procmail.log
LOCKFILE=       $HOME/.lockmail

INCLUDERC=/etc/mail/spamassassin/spamassassin-default.rc

:0
*^Subject:.*\[SPAM\]
spamjunk

Will remove all mail with [SPAM] in the header and put it in the file
spamjunk in the Mail directory/ All this is configurable.
-- 
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
715 Stadium Dr.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu