I think that your stats of 80% is probably pretty accurate for a default install. I watched closely my spam and was able to see a few patterns myself and therefore adjusted a couple of things.
I noticed that a very large portion of my spams, missed and not, were coming from SORBS and other blacklisted addresses. So I raised each one of them up to 2.5. 7-8 of them total. With just those and a default trained Bayes, I was consistantly hitting about 93%. I also installed several add on rules: weeds, chickenpox, antidrug. I left off backhair out of fear of FPing attachments that I get a lot of. I've installed Razor2 and DCC. I haven't gotten to Pyzor yet, evaluating each one as I go. Now with a default autolearned Bayes of about 18000 messages, which has quite a few mis-learned emails, I'm correctly catching 99.1% of my spam messages with only 1 FP. at a setting of 5.0 spam level. After getting Pyzor running, I'm going to dump my Bayes database and actively train it. So sitting at a set and forget a rate of 80% is good. If you babysit it for a few thousand emails (a couple of days here), you can hit those numbers. Bryan Britt Beltane Web Services -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ICQ: 53037451 Bryan L. Britt 501-327-8558 Beltane Web Services, Conway, AR http://www.beltane.com ~~~~~~~~~~Support Private Communications on the Internet~~~~~~~~~~ ----------------------- Original Message ----------------------- On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:28:06 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I have been using SpamAssassin for a year or so, and couldnt > get along without it. > > Still, I keep seeing writeups of Spamassassin where they say > that it is 99+% efficient at recognizing spam, at least now > that it has the Baysian filtering in it... > > Well, thats not the case here, it does recognize on the order > of 300 messages a day (thank you, thank you), but probably > misses on the order of another 75-100. > > So thats more like 75-80% not 99+%. > > Now the Baysian Filtering is up (I think) and primed. > the dcc stuff is up... > > But HOW DO I TELL IF THESE THINGS ARE REALLY WORKING? > > Is there any way to get any statistics out of SpamAssassin? > > I do see comments about the dcc stuff in the maillog on occasion, > mostly complaints about not being able to get to a specific site, > > but it would be nice > > to know if the Baysian stuff is working at all, > or if it (SpamAssassin) > was having long term problems getting to dcc sites. > > I dont see any 'flags' for any statistics, am I missing something? > Even a script to grep the 'tossed' messages (I save them for a few > days) would be acceptable, but at the moment SpamAssassin is a great > be black box,- it seems to work, but it could be having real problems > and I wouldnt have a clue. > > Well, thats longer than I wanted the message to be, but... > > > -- > Reg.Clemens > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
