How do I teach Spam Assassin?

[jdow]

From: "Bevan C. Bennett" <bevan at fulcrummicro.com>

> Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> > I've been collecting spam email that's gotten past my Fedora Core 1
> > installation of spam assassin (spamassassin-2.63-0.2) and I'd like to
"teach"
> > spam assassin about these messages (update the heuristics to be able to
> > filter these messages that are getting past the filter by default).
> >
> > Someone posted a command that does this on the list some time ago and
I've
> > unfortunately lost that message.  How can I teach spam assassin (system
wide)
> > about this email?  Thanks!
>
> "man sa-learn" has more information about this, as does
> /usr/share/doc/spamassassin-2.60/README.

http://wiki.spamassassin.org/ is an astonishingly good place to learn
about the ins and outs of SpamAssassin. it also mentions the home pages
of various custom rule sets like 99_TripWire, BigEvil, and many others.

It is well worth the visit.

(I have "progressed" to the point that SA filters my mail. I read my
mail via a secure pop2 connection. I maintain spam, oldspam, ham, and
oldham folders on a special account via IMAP to mbox files. I have a
futility that filters off the message 1 the imap tool insists must be
there so that a cron job every night runs "salearn" for me. This is
all rather handy when I am running this email tool. When I get time I
plan to revisit tossing the special folders into my main email account
"safely". I understand more now than when I started. {^_-})

If you need exotica, such as running Clam or Amavis then a visit to the
somewhat busy, 100 or more emails a day, spamassassin list is in order.
Visit the archives, PLEASE. There is a lot of very worth while discussion
history on the virus scanner, spamassassin, and procmail lashup, for
example.

Note that Bayes is useless until you have trained it. It takes 200 or
more each of ham and spam to train Bayes. When it kicks in it is rather
astonishingly effective.

I do not use auto-whitelist or self training. I concluded it was too
easy to poison a Bayes database that way when I read about the features.
Commentary on the list says I was slightly pessimistic. It's not EASY
to poison Bayes or AWL. But it is far from hard to do it by accident.

{^_^}