bogofilter satisfaction report

[Peter]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, JoeHill wrote:

> Okay, so I implemented bogofilter after 'training' it on several thousand mails,
> spam and non-spam (list mail mostly), and deactivated Mailfilter [1], and I have
> to say 'wow'. It works really well with a lot less effort than I originally put
> into configuring Mailfilter.

In the beginning I was scared by the manual page because:

plp at plp:~$ man bogofilter|wc -l
625

In the end, it was painless.

> A few spam are still getting past Bogofilter, but they're getting caught by my
> existing Procmail rules (no HTML, no Outlook, stuff like that).

It will get better. Also look at the score of spam that 'passes'. That 
will give you a hint on how low you can dare to push the spam threshold 
in bogofilter.conf. The lower you push it the more drastic the filter, 
but it may start reaping legitimate emails.

> Now, I called Bogo from Procmail as in the example from the manpage:
>
> :0HB:
> * ? bogofilter
> $MAILDIR/bogospam
>
> I'm curious, do you use the -u switch? In the FAQ, it seems to indicate that
> this can be dangerous if one does not keep an eye on things.

I have the -u switch on. Never gave me a hard time. Since no spam ever 
gets deleted (I collect it and delete it periodically) there is no risk 
of losing data. With -u bogofilter trains itself all the time. No matter 
what the spammers come up with bogofilter will learn (from you, when 
you send it the passed spam with -Ns) and keep 
reinforcing what it learned with every extra spam in the same 
Bayesian category. I wonder if it uses a hmm. I will have to pick it 
apart, it is intruguing.

> Anyhow, thanks again for the push, I've been meaning to check out Bogofilter for
> some time (hey, with ESR how can ya go wrong??) and so far I've been spam-free
> for most of the day. We'll see in the morning.

ok, don't hold your breath ;-)
Peter
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