bogofilter satisfaction report

[Peter]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, JoeHill wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:56:03 +0300 (IDT)
> Peter disseminated the following:
>
>> I have installed the bogofilter spam filter a few months ago and it has
>> become so good in time that I no longer see spam at all (maybe one
>> message per week, not every week). This is just to say that it works
>> great and it seems to be like wine, i.e. it gets better in time (since
>> it learns from what I reject and from what I tell it not to treat as
>> spam). Its most important factors are size and speed: It is small! Even
>> after a few months its database is no larger than 15MB and maintenance
>> is zero. It is also fast. It's a great piece of software.
>
> Link me to a good howto for setup on a Debian box? My current setup just ain't
> cutting it anymore (Mailfilter + Procmail).

Simply download bogofilter and Berkeley DB, install both, and start 
using it. It's really painless. The instructions for procmail filter 
insertion are in the manpage (if you are impatient they are in the 
section 'INTEGRATION WITH OTHER TOOLS'). I was surprised myself. It 
helps if you have a large body of preserved spam to feed it. Also be 
advised that the program will take a while to learn what you 'like'. 
Simply follow the good advice in the manpage and you'll be fine. After a 
while you will eb able to lower the spam cutoff from standard 0.5 to 0.2 
or lower and life will become wonderful.

The tiny script that fixes the oopses is:

#!/bin/bash
#
# small  script to submit & clear uncaught spam and good messages
#
# plp 2004
#
if [ -f /home/plp/mail/s ]; then
         bogofilter -Ns < /home/plp/mail/s
         rm -f /home/plp/mail/s
fi

if [ -f /home/plp/mail/n ]; then
         bogofilter -Sn < /home/plp/mail/n
         rm -f /home/plp/mail/n
fi
true

It should be locked against concurrent access from the mailer (MUA) to 
n and s.

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml