On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 12:29:40PM -0400, Jim Maul wrote: > Scott Johnson wrote: > >After upgrading to SA 3.0, I noticed a lot of spam with subject lines > >including SEXUALLY- EXPLICIT started to get through, even though there > >were existing rules that were meant specifically to catch them. I first > >boosted the score of the rules that catch these messages from 10 to 100 > >(2 rules, see below), and saw that the ones that formerly "got through" > >were getting AWL scores in the negative 100-120 range. This morning a > >few *still* go through, so I boosted the score of those rules from 100 > >to *1000*. The next two messages snagged got AWL scores in the negative > >*thousand* range.
That makes sense. If you have a couple messages go thorough with score 4, and you raise the score to 100, the AWL thinks that address has an average score of 4, thus will subtract somewhere between 0 and 96 points (I don't remember how the math works to determine the actual number but it's probably in the middle of that range). Over time, if messages continue to get high scores, the amount subtracted will get smaller and smaller. If you increase the scores, the AWL simply gets convinced that the message is getting an abnormally high score and does its best to lower it toward the average. > >I read the FAQ on how AWL is supposed to work, but that doesn't seem to > >explain how messages can end up with such seemingly gigantic AWL scores. > >Does an AWL negative score somehow go "deeper" in response to very high > >positive SA scores? Nothing like this happened with 2.6. I'm not > >disappointed with 3.0 (it works extremely well otherwise), I'm just > >deeply puzzled. Did I mis a FAQ note somewhere? Screw up the upgrade > >somehow? Am I just completely misreading what's going on? Thanks in > >advance for any help you can provide! I don't think there were any major changes in 2.6 vs 3.0 with whitelist. Perhaps you never ran into this with 2.6. > This is (from what i understand) how AWL is supposed to work. You could > lower the score to -999999999 and AWL would bring it right back up to > +999999999. Its supposed to sort of average things out. The real > question here is why is it trying to AWL it at all. That, > unfortunately, i dont have an answer for. I dont use AWL specifically > because of things like this. I have never been able to get it to work > correctly. Or maybe it was working correctly and i just never > understood it. Either way, im happy without it. If you lower the score to -100, it'll add roughly 50 points assuming the long term average is roughly 0. (My recollection of this is a little hazy and I can remember the mathematical formula, but there doesn't seem to be a problem here.) -- Duncan Findlay
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