How do I teach Spam Assassin?

[Jeff Vian]

jdow wrote:

>From: "Bevan C. Bennett" <bevan at fulcrummicro.com>
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>>Christofer C. Bell wrote:
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>>>I've been collecting spam email that's gotten past my Fedora Core 1
>>>installation of spam assassin (spamassassin-2.63-0.2) and I'd like to
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>"teach"
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>>>spam assassin about these messages (update the heuristics to be able to
>>>filter these messages that are getting past the filter by default).
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>>>Someone posted a command that does this on the list some time ago and
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>I've
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>>>unfortunately lost that message.  How can I teach spam assassin (system
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>wide)
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>>>about this email?  Thanks!
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>>"man sa-learn" has more information about this, as does
>>/usr/share/doc/spamassassin-2.60/README.
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>http://wiki.spamassassin.org/ is an astonishingly good place to learn
>about the ins and outs of SpamAssassin. it also mentions the home pages
>of various custom rule sets like 99_TripWire, BigEvil, and many others.
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>It is well worth the visit.
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>(I have "progressed" to the point that SA filters my mail. I read my
>mail via a secure pop2 connection. I maintain spam, oldspam, ham, and
>oldham folders on a special account via IMAP to mbox files. I have a
>futility that filters off the message 1 the imap tool insists must be
>there so that a cron job every night runs "salearn" for me. This is
>all rather handy when I am running this email tool. When I get time I
>plan to revisit tossing the special folders into my main email account
>"safely". I understand more now than when I started. {^_-})
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I am interested in how you do this.
I use fetchmail to get me mail by pop3 from the isp and put it in my 
account on the linux box.  I then need to get it into the maildirs 
(instead of the default mailbox) so I can teach SA, but am unsure of the 
mechanics of making that happen.  Any pointers on getting the maildirs 
working will be greatly appreciated.

>If you need exotica, such as running Clam or Amavis then a visit to the
>somewhat busy, 100 or more emails a day, spamassassin list is in order.
>Visit the archives, PLEASE. There is a lot of very worth while discussion
>history on the virus scanner, spamassassin, and procmail lashup, for
>example.
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>Note that Bayes is useless until you have trained it. It takes 200 or
>more each of ham and spam to train Bayes. When it kicks in it is rather
>astonishingly effective.
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>I do not use auto-whitelist or self training. I concluded it was too
>easy to poison a Bayes database that way when I read about the features.
>Commentary on the list says I was slightly pessimistic. It's not EASY
>to poison Bayes or AWL. But it is far from hard to do it by accident.
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>{^_^}
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