spamassassin/user_prefs

[Charles Howse]

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On Wednesday 24 March 2004 03:55 am, Nigel Wade wrote:
> Charles Howse wrote:
> > jdow has pointed me to a page with custom rulesets:
> > http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CustomRulesets
> > but I'm still interested in comments or generic settings for my
> > ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs file.  Anyone care to share?
>
> I'm not sure there really are any generic settings in user_prefs. The
> entire point of user_prefs is for user specific custom settings.
>
> One thing I always do, however, with a new install of SA is to set any
> tests which have negative scores to zero. The spammers are no longer
> stupid, and they know SA is used in many servers so deliberately target SA.
> If there's a way to reduce the SA score they will exploit it, so I remove
> the negative scores before they get a chance. One specific case was when SA
> assigned a negative score to a Subject: field with Re: in it. How many
> spams now have Re: in the subject?

Now that I have had time to think a little more, I have another question about 
training spamassassin.

I have the following folders in KMail, that should always contain ham:

Fedora - msgs from this list, which I normally trash after reading, unless I 
consider them worth moving to the Saved folder
inbox - msgs from which I have manually eliminated the spam by moving them to 
the Spam folder
Kent - old and new msgs from one of my whitelisted buddies that I wish to keep 
forever
Saved - old and new msgs from any source that I wish to keep forever
Stooges - msgs from the computers on my home lan that I expire after 2 days 
(mostly things like logwatch reports)

The question is:  is it wrong to train spamassassin by running sa --learn on 
the same msgs ( + or -  a few) over and over?

For example, should I run sa --learn regularly on the Saved folder, which 
contains msgs that I have had for a long time, in addition to new msgs.

I would think that I could whitelist the msgs from the computers on my home 
lan, and not run sa --learn on them.  Msgs in the Kent folder are also on the 
whitelist.

Does that make sense?

- -- 
Charles Howse
Jackson, TN
Registered Linux user # 347576 (http://counter.li.org)
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