[Spambayes] train on blank spam messages

[Kenny Pitt]

Ryan Malayter wrote:
> I frequently get entirely blank messages (no subject or body,
> sometimes even without FROM or TO address). These are obviously
> abortive spam attempts, generated by buggy spam ware.
> 
> Should I train on these? I have been, figuring that SpamBayes could at
> least generate subject:None tokens, and perhaps something from the
> Received headers.

If SpamBayes is not correctly classifying them, I personally don't see a
reason not to train on them.

> Although, I notice that SpamBayes doesn't mine the
> class-B or class-C network from the Received header. Has this been
> tried? Or is it useless in this day of spam-spewing, compromised home
> machines? That a message came directly from a machine on PacBell's DSL
> network, rather than a well-known PacBell SMTP relay, would seem to
> be a fairly strong spam clue to me.

This is an option that is disabled by default, but you can enable it
easily enough.  If you're using the Outlook plugin, you'll need to
create a file name "default_bayes_customize.ini" in your "Documents and
Settings\username\Application Data\SpamBayes" directory.  In the file,
insert the following 2 lines:

[Tokenizer]
mine_received_headers:True

-- 
Kenny Pitt