[SAtalk] spamassassin again.

2004-01-30 Thread Spyros Tsiolis
Hello ,

this has been posted also to the xmail list.
I thought I had problems posting here so...
---
Hello lst !!
(in a vibrant loud attittude [and voice :-)]   !  )

OK ! Topic of the month and the next ... Spamassassin !!

OK , a couple of questions. If any of you chaps wrestled with
the beast
feel free to come forward and share info. Here we go :
1. spamassassin ! Plain sa installation . What next ? Training ?
   1000 Spam and 1000 Ham ??
2. spamassassin and sa_filter.pl. Invoking spamd instead of
spamassassin.
  Can someone still train spamassassin ? From what Don told me
you don't
  But I need this clarified. Could someone answer this ?
3. Say you _DON'T_ train spamassassin and you leave it running
with spamd
   and Dons' options. Can someone at least enroll any relevant
mail (ham)
   that is being treated as spam in the whitelist, so they
don't get
thrown?
4. This is one of the most serious questions that's been bugging
me for the
last weeks.
   We have Xmail running and people get their ham and spam. Can
someone
   define a simple way of actually grabbing hold of spam and
putting it
onto,say , a
   spam mail account, so then I (the admin) can go and start
feeding the
beast
   (that'd be spamassassin) in order for it live and learn ?
   OK, I'll analyze this ; I told people to forward spam mail
to my account
on the
   clients' site, so I can have a look and see the message
format. However,
two
   issues arise :
   a. What exactly do I tell spamassassin when I get all this
mail flood
via the
   Microsoft Outlook MUA and the message headers have been
altered
anyway
   (it's from [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
inside is the
mail
with the _real_ headers like
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]).
b. Do I strip the last headers ? And if yes, how ?? !!!
Two reasons I posted this on the xmail list and not on the sa
list :
a. I use sa with Xmail (good enough for me :-)
b. The sa list never gets a message I send. Same happens here
but sometimes.
   Don't ask me why; I have no idea :-)
Please help ! ;-)



s.

---



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_
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Re: [SAtalk] spamassassin again.

2004-01-30 Thread Matt Kettler
At 01:22 PM 1/30/2004, Spyros Tsiolis wrote:

1. spamassassin ! Plain sa installation . What next ? Training ?
1000 Spam and 1000 Ham ??


Bayes training is a good thing. Ideal is to have a spam/ham training ratio 
close to what comes into your server in reality. However, considerable 
variance isn't a problem, as long as it's not wildly wrong..

1000/1000 is a good starting point for bayes training.  Just keep try to 
keep things as close to reality as possible without excessive effort.


2. spamassassin and sa_filter.pl. Invoking spamd instead of
spamassassin.
   Can someone still train spamassassin ? From what Don told me
you don't  But I need this clarified. Could someone answer this ?
I'm not familiar with sa_filter.pl, but people using the spamd/spamc combo 
CAN train bayes.. you just need to make sure you pass a -u parameter that 
is a user you can su to before training.

The reason you need to -u is that spamd will fall back to nobody if both it 
and spamc are called as root. Bayes training normally goes in the user's 
home dir, but in the case of the user nobody, some systems have /dev/null 
type homedirs.



3. Say you _DON'T_ train spamassassin and you leave it running
with spamd
and Dons' options. Can someone at least enroll any relevant
mail (ham)
that is being treated as spam in the whitelist, so they
don't get
thrown?
I'm not familiar with don's options, so I can't follow the thread here :)


4. This is one of the most serious questions that's been bugging
me for the
last weeks.
We have Xmail running and people get their ham and spam. Can
someone
define a simple way of actually grabbing hold of spam and
putting it
onto,say , a
spam mail account, so then I (the admin) can go and start
feeding the
beast
(that'd be spamassassin) in order for it live and learn ?
This is actually partly mentioned in SA the FAQ... http://wiki.spamassassin.org

In short, forwarding generally doesn't work.. to feed bayes you need a 
more-or-less _exact_ copy of the message, complete with original, mostly 
unaltered headers. Some have suggested using bounce/redirect features of 
some mailclients, others have suggested having user's send them as 
attachments and stripping them..

If you can set up system that gets you a clean message, you're golden.. 
Personally, I don't know of anyone doing it, but it is at least 
theoretically possible.

I don't bother with user-feedback training myself.. it's too much work to 
make it go.

Instead I have a spamtrap, and a nonspamtrap that I use for training.

I subscribe the nonspamtrap address to some popular legit newsletters my 
users get. cnn news updates, industry newsletters, etc.. I monitor it for 
spam, and I never mention it's address anywhere to prevent it from being 
picked up.

The spamtrap is a collection addresses that I've seeded in example postings 
to mailing lists that winds up with good clean spam. I might make a post 
discussing a technical and unrelated issue, and use a made up email address 
like [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a part of the example. Believe it or 
not, I'm going to start getting bounces for that address in a week or two. 
After I'm sure it's all spam (and some undisclosed time has gone by), I'll 
funnel it into the spamtrap.

I feed both mailboxes to sa-learn daily, along with carefully transferred 
selections from my own mailbox. (since I'm transferring by hand, this is 
easier than trying to make a userproof automated system)




Two reasons I posted this on the xmail list and not on the sa
list :
a. I use sa with Xmail (good enough for me :-)
b. The sa list never gets a message I send. Same happens here
but sometimes.
Well SA list got your post this time, the sf.net servers are being _really_ 
slow this week due to the mydoom worm and other things clogging up the 
mailservers.



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See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
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