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Re: Is this a good idea?
From: |
Thomas Cameron |
Subject: |
Re: Is this a good idea? |
Date: |
Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:59:03 -0500 |
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