Re: Is this a good idea?

[Thomas Cameron]

Questions and answers inline, below:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nate Schindler" <address@hidden>
> To: <address@hidden>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 12:34 PM
> Subject: RE: Is this a good idea?
>
> Sendmail is using a fairly generic configuration.  There are no local
> mail users on that machine, except for a spamtrap account that feeds
> mail directly back into 'sa-learn --spam'.

But doesn't SA need at least 200 hams and 200 spams before Bayes kicks in? 
And don't you really want to have about the same number of spams and hams to 
train Bayes with?

> SpamAss-Milter is configured to block mail when SA tells it to.

Same here.  We tag as spam at 4 and reject at 6.  I *love* that feature.

> It's configured to pass the mail alias (what's before the @ sign) as the
> user to spamc so that custom thresholds can be looked up by spamd.
> SpamAssassin is set up to take the alias from SpamAss-Milter, and check
> it against a MySQL userpref table to see if there are any custom rules
> for this particular user.

Did you set up the MySQL stuff?  I am not a DBA so this might not be easy 
for me.  Also, how do your customers modify their settings in the DB?  Do 
you have to do it for them?

> Our CEO, for example, wants no mail sent to
> him blocked... so in the userpref table, he's got a "required_hits"
> entry of 100.  This is convenient, because SpamAssassin and SpamAss-Milt
> still properly tag the message with X-Spam-Level.  The CEO has Outlook
> configured to move messages with more than 5 stars to a Spam folder in
> his mailbox.  So, for people like him, it still separates spam from ham.
> For everybody else, it just rejects the spam.
> I also have custom rules defined for SpamAssassin to read the MessageWall
> score, and adjust its own score according to MessageWall's suggestion.
> As far as what you were saying about copying spam and ham to separate 
> mailboxes
> for learning purposes, the bayes_auto_learn option of SpamAssassin 
> facilitates
> this.

Right, that's why I was not sure it was a good idea at all.  I guess what I 
really need is a way for the users to somehow forward false negatives and 
positives back to the relay server.

> The only problem with it is that you don't have the original messages
> which trained the database.... however the concept of how it works is the 
> same
> as you described - exceptionally spammy messages are automatically learned 
> as
> spam, and exceptionally hammy messages are learned as ham.  The scores 
> used to
> make the decision of whether or not SpamAssassin should learn a message 
> are
> configurable.

Yeah, I guess I could start tweaking those values to get the same results.

> After this, final delivery finally takes place.
> In Exchange, I have a couple public folders set up - Spam, and Ham.  Users 
> know
> that if they receive a false negative, they can copy it to the Spam 
> folder, and
> I use it to train the filter periodically.

But doesn't the extra header info that Exchange adds screw things up?

> That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.  If any portion of this chain of 
> stuff
> seems interesting to you, I can show you how it's configured.

It is very interesting but I think I will do things a bit differently.  Not 
sure just how yet, but I will get back to the list when I figure it out.

Thanks!
TC