Hello,
I was kind of shocked when I discovered that there is no SpamAssassin
manual
or tutorial. For me, it's unimaginable that the world's leading open
source
spam detection software is missing such an important piece of
documentation.
http://spamassassin.apache.org/doc.html
There are a large number of ways SpamAssassin can be incorporated into
someone's system. Besides what is provided on the SpamAssassin site and the
documentation provided with SpamAssassin itself, there are many HOWTOs out
there that deal with particular setups. Google is your friend.
The wiki pages are more bits and pieces than a coherent documentation and
often don't explain things in principal but give you finished configuration
files for procmail & Co. But what if I don't use procmail? (I use Courier
maildrop.)
At the moment, I run spamassassin with no arguments as an ordinary user on
every message I receive and decied what to do with the message accoring to
the X-Spam-Flag: header line. But I have some problems with this.
First, SpamAssassin seems to do autolearning. What does this mean? Does
it
learn that messages which it already considers spam are spam, and messages
which it already considers ham are ham? Wouldn't this mean that
SpamAssassin
is just doing self-affirmation?
Bayes builds a database of the tokens in obvious spam, and in obvious ham.
When a message is recieved its tokens are compared to the database to help
push the score one way or the other (or not). It's not self-affirmation
because Bayes itself does not influence whether something is autolearned or
not. The Bayes score tweak happens afterwards. It's more akin to learning
from experience.
Second, I often have a message of the following form in my mail log:
courierlocal: [â¦] Cannot open bayes databases
/home/wolfgang/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: lock failed: File exists
What's the problem here, and how can I get rid of it?
I would first try setting
lock_method flock
in local.cf
and if that does not help, try
bayes_learn_to_journal 1
http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.0.x/dist/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html#learning_options
Better yet, move Bayes to MySQL. This HOWTO is geared towards amavisd-new,
but could be used for any other user and would be good for site-wide use,
simply substitute the user name:
http://www200.pair.com/mecham/spam/debian-spamassassin-sql.html
I'm using SpamAssassin 3.0.3 on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1.
Thanks for you help.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang
Gary V
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