Hi all,
I receive close to 100 spam mails a day.

So I set up spamassassin (2.60-rc2) from source.
I receive mail thru fetchmail and filter it thru
spamassassin by creating .procmailrc and .forward
files as given in SA INSTALL file to receive good mail
in /var/spool/mail/srikanth and spam in a "caughtspam"
file.

Initially, filtering was good. THen after sometime, 10 to11
spam mails leaked through.
I then used training of SA by giving "sa-learn" since I have a
20 MB caughtspam file now with close to 2200 spam mails.

The funny thing is , each day, before I receive mail, if i train
SA by giving "sa-learn --spam --mbox /home/srikanth/caughtspam"
and then if I receive mail using fetchmail, filtering is really
good and no spam comes through or only one or two comes thru.

But if I retrieve mail thru fetchmail without going thru "sa-learn" first,
it is the old story again, 10 or 11 spam comes thru.
I checked it more than 5 to 6 times by both methods and the result is
consistent.

Why?

Does SA needs to be trained everytime? Does it forget what it previously
learnt? I think not , since it says it learnt only from 7 or10 messages
and I have not given any forget options to "sa-learn".

Can anybody enlighten ?

NS Srikanth

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On Thu, 06 Nov 2003 22:30:08 +0500, N S Srikanth <nssrikanth@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Can anybody enlighten ?

Yeah, folks on the SpamAssassin users mailing list, I think..

It sounds all like coincidence to me... spam isn't consistent enough to
get a good sampling, and a few leaking through won't quite do that.

Just to be sure, you're training SpamAssassin with ham as well as spam,
right? A good mixture, I've heard, is about 60% ham, 40% spam.

--
Rob | If not safe,
Email and Jabber: | one can never be free.
athlonrob at axpr dot net |
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