Re: SA going downhill
On Wednesday 16 June 2004 04:45, Antony wrote:
> Hi all,
>[ big snip]
>
> Is there anything that I can do about this? I know about training it,
> but doesn't that need thousands of messages to work?
>
> A
Yes, training spamassassin requires thousands of messages to work, both ham
messages and spam messages. When I first installed spamassassin, it caught
nothing. I didn't realize that thousands meant thousands. Once I got a
thousand spam messages to train it on, it started working better and
better. My hit rate now is probably 75% or greater, with no false
positives (I've only ever had one false positive). I know 75% isn't
awesome, but I'm being conservative, because I don't really track it that
closely, and I don't want to mislead you into thinking it'll be perfect.
But it's enough that I get most of my spams properly identified.
I don't have spamassassin set to autolearn, and I've noticed that right
after I train it with the newest messages, it works great. Then, new style
spam comes out, and it does poorly for a bit. I then train it on the
newest spams, and it works great again. That's what autolearn is for, I
guess, but I'd rather not have to deal with false positives. I could train
it once a day via a cron job, but I haven't done that yet.
As always, your mileage may vary, but hopefully not that much! :-)
Justin Guerin
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