On 8/15/2012 4:19 PM, Kris Deugau wrote: > John Hardin wrote: >> I wasn't aware that autolearning could do a cold-start of Bayes, can >> anyone confirm whether this is the case? > > If you let it run long enough to pass the 200/200 ham/spam thresholds, > yes; there's no distinction I've ever met about where the learning came > from. > > That said, I wouldn't trust a pure autolearn setup with stock autolearn > thresholds - all too much spam will get learned scoring under 0.1. :( > > -kgd >
It's a bit disappointing to learn this (pardon the pun), given: a.) This exchange between John Hardin and I, which occurred previously in this thread: ---8<-------------------------- Me: > Most of the list is probably laughing, but given the complexity of Spam > Assassin, this crucial requirement was lost on me, amidst the sea of > information and instructions. For example, there is no mention of the > fact that SA is essentially useless without Bayesian training on > http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/StartUsing . John: That's because that shouldn't be the case. The base ruleset + URIBL should be very effective pretty much out-of-the-box. ---8<-------------------------- b.) The default value for bayes_auto_learn is 1 (on). (At least in my particular distribution.) Correct me if I'm wrong, but this issue's root cause seems to be that bayes_auto_learn was on, out-of-the-box, yet I was not complementing its efficacy via sa-learn. Is this an accurate summary? Because if so, it seems prudent to change the default bayes_auto_learn value to zero, and scorn any package maintainer or developer who modifies it, or, alternatively, put a banner, at font-size 100em, on the SpamAssassin homepage that issues an unmistakable warning about Bayesian training's importance. (John, I'll respond to your most recent message tomorrow most likely; had enough for one day!) Thank you, -Ben
