ot, spamassassin question

[John G. Heim]

First about verbose headers... By that I just meant that if you looked at 
the message headers and didn't see any info from spamassassin, you would 
have to change a flag. That flag turns out to be report_safe. But I think 
you must already have it set correctly or you wouldn't see the headers 
you've reproduced below.

One thought that occurs to me is that sa-learn has to have had a certain 
number of messages passed to it before it starts to apply bayesian 
filtering. IIRC, the number is 200. There's a quick way to get it to reach 
that number which is to turn on autolearning.

bayes_auto_learn 1

As you probably know, a list of rules that were used to calculate the spam 
score is listed on the line that starts with X-Spam-Status. There should be 
a bayesian rule listed  there in the form, bayes_XX where XX is the bayesian 
probability that the message is spam. There should be something listed like 
bayes_00 to bayes_99 or somewhere in between.
So for whatever reason, I think bayesian logic is not being applied. I 
doubled checked and I see that bayesian filtering is suppoesed to be on by 
default. All my spamassassin config files have it explicitly turned on and 
I'm not sure what happens if you use the defaults.

use_bayes 1
use_bayes_rules 1

The only other thing I can think of is that if you are running spamassassin 
as a daemon, you need to restart it after changing the config.





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: ot, spamassassin question


> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi John and all,
>
> According to the comments in local.cf, the option use_bayes was set to
> 1 by default, so I didn't uncomment it when initially setting things
> up. I've uncommented it now though, and sent a test message, to see if
> there is any change in the headers, but they are as they've always
> been:
>
> "X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (2008-06-10) on
>        linserver.romuald.net.eu.org
> X-Spam-Level:
> X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL,NO_RELAYS
>        autolearn=ham
>        version=3.2.5".
>
> These are the headers from my test message, and the scores are higher
> than 0 on other messages of course, though I'm not sure how much of
> what has come in was marked higher than 5, if any of it.
>
> I searched the spamass docs for a verbose logging option like you
> mentioned, but don't see any such option. Can you please be more
> specific on what I should be looking for, or what to place into
> local.cf to get the desired behavior? Thanks.
>
> Greg
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 02:43:38PM -0600, John G. Heim wrote:
>> One thing you should check is to see if bayesian filtering is even
>> working. Maybe the sa-learn command is having no effect for one reason or
>> another. You can configure spamassassin to put a verbose log in the
>> message header. If you do that and if bayesian filtering is working, you
>> should see lines like the following in the message headers:
>>
>> *  3.5 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
>>
>> That line is good. It means spamassassin used bayesian logic to figure
>> out that this message was spam and added 3.5 to the spam score.  If it
>> was only 50% certain, it would have added less. If the probably is less
>> than that, it subtracts from the score.
>>
>> You can check to see if bayesian filtering is working by looking for
>> lines like the one above in your message headers and seeing if
>> spamassassin seems to be learning to identify spam. If those lines do not
>> appear or if the probabilities don't seem to be increasing as you'd
>> expect, you will have to investigate further.
>>
>> Things to check:
>> Is bayesian filtering turned on in your spamassassin local.cf file?
>> Does the end user have write access to her bayesian rules database file?
>>
>
>
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