ot, spamassassin question

[John G. Heim]

A couple of notes:

1. You can dump the contents of the bayesian database:

sa-learn --dump

Among other things, that shows you how many messages you've fed to the learn 
function.

2. You can run sa-learn in debug mode with the -D option.


----- 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: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: ot, spamassassin question


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> John and all,
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:12:07AM -0600, John G. Heim wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Hmmm, report_safe was set to 0. I changed it to 1, and did a
> invoke-rc.d spamassassin reload, with no difference. That would
> suggest that changes in local.cf aren't being applied, except I know
> that they are being applied. I know this, because I had to put
> report_hostname linserver.romuald.net.eu.org
> into local.cf to show the correct host name on which the scanning took
> place. Before I added that line, the host name displayed in the
> headers was localhost, so local.cf is being read, and applied it seems.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> It has had a lot more than 200 messages pass through it, I'd say
> something on the order of a couple thousand by now, ham and spam. Yes,
> autolearning is enabled too, and the headers show that it is taking
> place when the score is low enough.
>
>>
>> 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
>
> Yeah, I'd agree that it looks like the bayesian rules aren't being
> applied. After reading the above, I explicitly put
> use_bayes 1
> and
> use_bayes_rules 1
> into local.cf, did invoke-rc.d spamassassin reload, and sent another
> test message, but still no joy.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> Yup, did a reload as shown above. Besides that, we had a short power
> outage during the night, and the server machine restarted
> completely. That means that if a reload wasn't good enough to read the
> config changes, I should have seen different header info this morning
> after the full restart, and that's not the case.
>
> Looks like I'm going to have lots of fun cracking this one, and once I
> figure it out, I'll probably slap myself, and say "oh, what a moron I
> am, that was so obvious." If you have any other ideas on what to check
> for, please share, and thank you very much for your troubleshooting
> help so far.
>
> Greg
>
>
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