spambayes

[Aaron Konstam]

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 10:38 -0700, Justin Zygmont wrote:
> On Tue, 9 May 2006, Claude Jones wrote:
> 
> > On Mon May 8 2006 6:58 pm, Frank Cox wrote:
> >> Has anyone used this?
> >>
> >> http://software.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=06/03/24/1728247
> >>
> >> Comments?  Alternatives?
> >>
> >> It looks very cool.  Are there any up-to-date rpm packages around anywhere?
> >> The only ones that I could find are substantially out-of-date.
> >
> > I've used Spambayes on both Linux and Windows boxes for over a year now. It's
> > a normal part of my installation of a new distro, these days. Spambayes can
> > be detected by Kmail's anti-spam configuration wizard these days, and that's
> > quite nice.
> >
> > Installation is extremely simple. Unpack the tarball anywhere you prefer, and
> > run 'python set_up.py' as root from the folder in which you unpacked the
> > tarball - that installs everything (you can delete the folder after that).
> > Then, you want to start it at boot-time. I use
> >
> > 'nohup python /usr/bin/sb_server.py &'
> >
> > as a line in rc.local, or better, lately I've been using the above as a script
> > file in my /.kde/startup folder - that invokes the spambayes server as user
> > instead of root - it works just fine that way.
> >
> > Then, either reboot, or start the spambayes server manually and open Firefox
> > or any browser and put 'http://localhost:8880/' in your address bar and click
> > on 'configure' - I usually just worry about the topmost two fields, leaving
> > everything else in default.
> >
> > In the topmost field, you enter the url of your pop mail servers, separated by
> > commas. In the ports field, just pick random ports to proxy on, separated by
> > commas ( I use 1110,1111,1112, for example)
> >
> > After that, you have to configure your email client to use localhost for each
> > pop server, and the corresponding port you entered in the second field,
> > above.
> >
> > Spambayes should start piping your mail through its filters after that, if
> > you've got everything right. It will add a classification line to each mail
> > header, labeling it as 'spam', 'unsure', or 'ham' (look at your header lines,
> > and you'll this extra line as
> >
> > 'X-Spambayes-Classification: ham'
> >
> > - use your email client filters to direct the mail to wherever you'd like it
> > to end up according to these classifications. If you use kmail, as already
> > mentioned, much of the email client header classification filtering gets done
> > for you if you go through the anti-spam wizard...
> >
> > Hope that helps - there's more that can be configured, and I may have left
> > something out, but that should be enough to get you going. You'll have to
> > read the faq on the spambayes site to learn about training, but that's fairly
> > straightforward. After several days, you'll find Spambayes removing well over
> > 90% of your spam with almost no false positives. I get over 400 spams per day
> > because of multiple published email addresses, but, Spambayes makes that
> > completely manageable. One further comment, while it's true that Thunderbird
> > uses bayesian filtering, and it's pretty good, it's not the same as
> > Spambayes, which in my opinion is an even better implementation of bayesian
> > principles - there are some pretty good docs on the net if you google for
> > them, to explain the principles behind bayesian filtering - Spambayes is one
> > of several implementations of the principles involved.
> 
> Are you able to tell if its much more effective than spamassassin?  I get 
> spam coming through spamassassin with a 0.0 score!
Are you saying that mail that is assigned a 0 spam score and should be
spam are evaluated incorrectly? Then something is wrong with your
configuration. 
My objection to spambayes is theit assertion that classifying mail into
three catagories spam, ham and unknown does not make for better spam
detection. In my opinion the papers they have defending this position
are just plain wrong. But spambayes does work to cull out spam but in my
experience it is no better than spamasssasin.

-- 
Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net>