Finally got round to setting up SpamAssassin on my email account earlier today. The amount of spam I've been getting has gone up dramatically recently to around 70-80 spams a day. I've been meaning to set it up, but just never got round to it, so earlier this afternoon I took the plunge.
I had to firstly set up Qmail to redirect all my incoming mail through Procmail so that I could invoke SpamAssassin to do its work. I found a helpful .procmailrc script on the SpamAssassin Wiki, so it was quite painless. It seems to work as it's trapped a couple of spams since I set it up.
However, it's only trapped 2 of the 5 spams I've received, so I've obviously got a bit of tinkering to do to get it running better. Ideally I'd have Bayesian filtering working via bmf instead of SpamAssassin, but I don't have a big enough corpus of messages to train it with yet.
So now I'm actively collecting mail on the server so that I can build up a decent corpus to train my bmf filter to do a better job. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have a big enough selection to give it a go and see what happens. Until then SpamAssassin will hopefully reduce the amount of crap I have to download.
Posted by fatboab at March 22, 2004 08:35 PM
