I still fee like a tyro with SpamAssassin, but my installation is catching better than 99% with perhaps 0.1% false positives (thanks in large part to things I've learned from this list), and I think I can tell you a couple of things better than just read the manual. (But, do read the manual!) My initial experience with SpamAssassin about a year ago was through a large web hosting company and I was limited to playing with SpamAssassin through cpanel, though till they moved SpamAssassin to its own server, I could also edit my own user preferences directly. The problem was, this big company never could get it right, so now I'm running my own mailserver(s) out of what seemed like necessity. I'm running Gentoo with SA 3.1.7.
sa-learn is used to train and keep up-to-date the bayesian database. So, turn on autolearn in your /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf so the line reads: bayes_auto_learn 1 (should be on by default). This will cause selected spam and ham that you get to be used automagically to keep the bayesian database up-to-date. I'm using maildir and have two subdirectories in my .maildir called: 2-learn-spam 2-learn-ham I put missed spam in 2-learn-spam and ham misclassified as ham in 2-learn-ham. Then, whenever I have a few messages in one of those directories, I run one of the following scripts: learnspam.scr, which contains this line: sa-learn --spam --progress /home/figueroa/.maildir/.2-learn-spam/cur learnham.scr which contains this line: sa-learn --ham --progress /home/figueroa/.maildir/.2-learn-ham/cur This is on my personal mailserver. On the mailserver I run at a school, I run that script on each users 2-learn-spam/ham directories every night under crontab. Run an up-to-date version of SpmaAsssasin. I was having pretty good results with 3.1.3 (the unmasked version in Gentoo), but got immediately better results when I upgraded to the current version. Also, to keep your RULES up-to-date, run sa-update as root from time-to-time. Good luck! Happy spamassassaning! -- Andy Figueroa http://philippians-1-20.us/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Friday 29 December 2006 08:23, Vernon Webb wrote: > Yesterday someone asked if I used sa-learn and the response to myself > was, I have something else to learn. Can someone explain to me how to > use it? > > If I understand correctly sa-learn can be used to train SA to > recognize certain messages as SPAM or HAM. I've run the sa-learn > command but it is not very clear as to how it is used. I mean I > understand if I use "sa-learn --spam" I can train SA that something > is SPAM but what, where? For instance today the thing is not "Effie > Present" but rather "Happy NW Effie". So the efforts I took > yesterday using the phish.ndb and scan.ndb database is still not > cathcing these guys (however it is catching some Phishing scams). > > I'm willing to try sa-learn, but what will that do for me? These guys > are beginning to drive me nuts and obvioulsy I have something wrong > as others are telling me these are being caught as SPAM on their > systems. > > Thanks
