I guess milage varies. Auto-Learn has been a life saver for us and has drastically reduced false postives we used to get with emails to our College's Health Care & Research departments. We pass all local user email through SA as well, so this really helps the system learn what is 'good' email.
I'd suggest that everyone should at least try it and monitor the results. -----Original Message----- From: Nigel Frankcom [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 11:17 AM To: users@spamassassin.apache.org Subject: Re: sa-learn explained On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 09:51:05 -0500, Andy Figueroa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I still fee like a tyro with SpamAssassin, but my installation is >catching better than 99% with perhaps 0.1% false positives (thanks in >large part to things I've learned from this list), and I think I can >tell you a couple of things better than just read the manual. (But, do >read the manual!) My initial experience with SpamAssassin about a year >ago was through a large web hosting company and I was limited to >playing with SpamAssassin through cpanel, though till they moved >SpamAssassin to its own server, I could also edit my own user >preferences directly. The problem was, this big company never could >get it right, so now I'm running my own mailserver(s) out of what >seemed like necessity. I'm running Gentoo with SA 3.1.7. > >sa-learn is used to train and keep up-to-date the bayesian database. >So, turn on autolearn in your /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf so the >line reads: >bayes_auto_learn 1 >(should be on by default). >This will cause selected spam and ham that you get to be used >automagically to keep the bayesian database up-to-date. > >I'm using maildir and have two subdirectories in my .maildir called: >2-learn-spam >2-learn-ham > >I put missed spam in 2-learn-spam and ham misclassified as ham in >2-learn-ham. Then, whenever I have a few messages in one of those >directories, I run one of the following scripts: > >learnspam.scr, which contains this line: >sa-learn --spam --progress /home/figueroa/.maildir/.2-learn-spam/cur > >learnham.scr which contains this line: >sa-learn --ham --progress /home/figueroa/.maildir/.2-learn-ham/cur > >This is on my personal mailserver. On the mailserver I run at a >school, I run that script on each users 2-learn-spam/ham directories >every night under crontab. > >Run an up-to-date version of SpmaAsssasin. I was having pretty good >results with 3.1.3 (the unmasked version in Gentoo), but got >immediately better results when I upgraded to the current version. > >Also, to keep your RULES up-to-date, run sa-update as root from >time-to-time. > >Good luck! Happy spamassassaning! Personally, I'd disagree with auto-learn; having used SA in a production environment for some years I've found manual training to be a better solution. YMMV Just my 2 (pick your currency) worth. Nigel
