[Spambayes] A couple questions regarding spambayes and it's features

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Sun, July 22, 2007 14:41, S James S Stapleton wrote:
> Background; I've been using Spambayes for a while, it starts out good,
> quickly
> is trained to great, but at some critical point drops to crud.
>
> At the great state, I get no false positives, and the false
> negatives/uncertains are low. But spammers change their tactics and I have
> too keep training to keep SB in the great state, until at one point it
> gets
> overtrained and *everything* pretty much goes into spam and I just get the
> few (1-5%) false negatives, and some mailing list stuff, in my box.
>
> (1) Is there any way to whitelist email addresses? The only address I get
> spam
> from regularly is when they spoof mine.
>
> (2) Can values be modified and locked? For example, I'm part of several
> mailing lists which tag their emails, [PyQt], [PHP], [PHP-WIN], [SDL],
> etc. I
> would like to be able to mark those tags, and some common keywords things
> like that as 'minimal spam probability]. Add to that some keywords I know
> I'll never see in a legitimate email, I wouldn't mind fast-fowarding them
> to
> the 'this is a spam word' state.
>
> Please CC me any responses, as I am not on the list.

I learned from your mail headers that you use Kmail so there is a 99%
possibility you're on Linux. Is that correct?
How do you have SpamBayes set up?

I use it as a procmail filter, like this:
(I don't have access to my .procmailrc ATM, perhaps later)

* First, a few rules that move mailing list traffic & mail from friends to
certain folders. This is a sort of procmail whitelist. These kinds of mail
don't get spamfiltered, however I have used them for initial training. -->
This already answers your two questions.
* A rule that scores mail with SB
* Everything with spamscore 100% gets the /dev/null treatment
* Remaining spam is moved to my spam suspect folder. (to move manually to
the training folder later)
* Unsures are _copied_ to my unsures folder
* Ham is moved to my inbox or processed by other procmail rules.

The exact syntax of this .procmailrc file is left as an exercise to the
reader. :)

-- 
Amedee