[TriLUG] Training Spamassassin

[Joseph Tate]

SA only self-trains above a threshold.  Before 3.0 there is no
indication as to the difference between a message that hasn't been
autolearned because it wasn't above a threshhold and spam that was not
autolearned because it had already been processed.  If something is
run through the autolearn engine, it'll get marked AUTOLEARN=SPAM or
AUTOLEARN=HAM.

In SA 3.0 it's a bit different.  There are now 6 different states. 
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the documentation
on that.

Joseph


On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:07:07 -0500, Rick DeNatale
<rick.denatale at gmail.com> wrote:
> I only train SA with either:
> 
>   1) Spam which got through (false negatives).
>   2) Ham which triggered a false positive and was mistakenly marked as spam.
> 
> As I understand it SA automatically trains itself on spam which it
> traps to tune on what spam techniques are au courant.
> 
> I haven't seen too much in the way of false positives out of SA in
> quite a while.  The gmail spam filter on the other hand seems to get a
> few false positives every week.
> 
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 08:46:17 -0500, Brian Henning
> <brian at strutmasters.com> wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> >    As I'm sure the postmasters among us are well-aware, in order to keep
> > my Bayesian filter working efficiently, it's occasionally necessary to
> > retrain it for new tacks the spammers have invented.   My question is
> > thus: Is it "safe" and/or wise to train with only -spam input?  Our
> > non-spam profile hasn't changed much, so the previous -ham training
> > ought to still be valid...right?  Or do I need to somehow balance the
> > training "sessions" with equal parts -spam and -ham even though the -ham
> > still looks about the same?
> >
> > Thanks as always,
> > ~Brian
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-- 
Joseph Tate
Personal e-mail: jtate AT dragonstrider DOT com
Web: http://www.dragonstrider.com