Re: sender name same as recipient name

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, John Calvert wrote:

> I have decided to restart this whole process... setting the bayes
> database back to its initial state & deleting auto-whitelist file.
>
> Is it good to use a bayes starter DB ?  If so, where can I get a
> good one.

It's not generally a good idea to use *somebody else's* data for your starter DB - the nature of their email traffic is not likely to be similar to yours.

This is why it's a good idea to keep the messages you use to train your bayes, if you're doing manual training - so that you can correct training errors, and retrain from scratch if necessary. Of course, that doesn't scale too well if you have large numbers of users and are autolearning...

If your users retrieve their email from your server using IMAP, here's one thing you can do: set up a SpamAssassin-SPAM and SpamAssassin-HAM mail folder in each user's mailbox. Have them move missed spams to the SpamAssassin-SPAM folder, and *copy* false positives (SA says it's spam when it isn't) to the SpamAssassin-HAM folder. They can (and ideally *should*) also copy some legitimate messages to their SpamAssassin-HAM folder so that SA can get an idea of what "ham" looks like.

You can then train off those folders, and retrain as needed. To manage the training work, you can rotate those files on a schedule - e.g. on October 1, everybody's SpamAssassin-HAM becomes SpamAssassin-HAM-200709, etc.

I have some scripting for that sort of thing here:

  http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/antispam/

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