Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 10:08:31AM -0400, Hugh Campbell wrote:
The spam filtering definitely _does_ work but it doesn't seem
particularly effective. At a minimum, it seems much less trainable
than my cat (that's not a lot). I seem to be training the spam
filter repetitively against the same or very similar types of mail.
You need huge amounts of spam to train spamassassin, but it does
indeed work. After a bout of spam making it through, I trained it
against my 4000 spams collected over time (most of them categorised
as such by spamassassin itself), and then received no uncaught spam
for a while.
I would think that it would be better to feed spamassassin the "false
negatives", i.e. the spam messages it *doesn't* catch, and run "sa-learn
--spam" on that.
Fortunately I have on my main server several old accounts that collect
nothing but tons of spam. I just alias all that mail to the same
account, filter all the spam that is caught into a separate folder, and
I end up with hundreds of false negatives.