Rikard wrote regarding '[SLE] [9.0] How can i tell if Spamassassin is learning?' on Fri, Aug 20 at 07:03:
Hi all!
How can i determine if SA actually is learning via sa-learn? I get a message that it processed xx files but it keeps missing out on the same types of mails i have fed it some 10 times... It only catches approx 10-20% of the spam i am receiving. I have a bayes database and the contents in it changes after a sa-learn, but it still fails to recognize spam.
The bayesian filter in only part of the weighted score a spam sees. Do you have long reports enabled? If not, turn those on and see if the probability the a message is spam according to the bayes DB goes up. You may also look at the spam score in the headers. If you're getting a lot of spam that's scored 4.9, you might move your threshold down to 4 instead of leaving it at 5... Note that the Bayes DB needs to learn from spam *and* ham to work well. If you haven't trained it with roughly equal amounts of ham and spam, it's not going to work well. Also, if it hasn't seen on the order of a few thousand of each message, it's not going to be working to its full potential. It takes time and lots of experience for it to learn, much like most things. :) I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe it helps none the less. If sa-learn says it processed all of those messages and doesn't throw an error, then it worked. It will alert you if it doesn't work. --Danny