Training SpamAssassin

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec 13, 2003, "Neil B. Cohen" <nbc at aikisoft.com> wrote:

> I have installed SpamAssassin on my mail server and it works very well.
> But it is still picking up only 50-60% of the junk delivered to my
> mailbox. So recently I started saving the junk that gets through into a
> SPAM folder and then I tried running

> sa-learn --spam --file spambox

> on that folder. I had 250+ messages in the folder, but when it finishes,
> it says something like "Learned from 1 message".

If it's an mbox file, use --mbox, not --file.  --file is for one
message in a file.

> 2) Can I expect to get SpamAssassin to get up to the point of getting
> rid of 90% or 95% of the junk that crosses the Net these days?

It does for me, but it's very important that you train it not only
with spam, but also with good e-mail, otherwise you may skew the
results or not even have enough data for it to kick in.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer