Bogofilter seems to not be working

[Jesse Meyer]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 11:49:25AM -0800, daniel wrote:
> I have set up bogofilter with the procmail recipies in the man page:
> 
> :0fw
> | bogofilter -u -e -p
               ^^^
Note the -u flag, I'll explain my theory in a bit.

> 
> [ Snip rest of procmail configuration ]
> 
> [ Snip description of spam filter scores approaching 0 over time ]

Here's my (bogofilter-uneducated) theory.  If I recall the man page 
correctly, the -u flag seems to allow bogofilter to continue learning, 
so if it thinks a message is spam, it tries to figure out what new 
spam rules it can learn from that message.  Inversely, if it considers 
the message as ham, it tries to figure out what new non-spam rules 
it can learn from the message.

You recieved scores in the .40's, originally, and they then slowly 
approached .00 over time.  When I read the documentation, I believe 
it mentioned .54 as the dividing point between spam and ham.

Now here's my theory, which hinges on the assumption that you are 
_not_ continually training bogofilter (you didn't mention it 
doing so).  I believe that bogofilter might been poorly trained 
in the beginning, so that it classified most spam as ham.  Then, as 
new messages were filtered through procmail and bogofilter, it then 
added more rules to classify the fake-ham as ham, dropping your 
scores near 0.

If this is the problem, then the solution is simple - remove the 
old score files, train bogofilter properly, and continue training it 
when it recieves false positives or negatives.

Of course, please note that I have been using bogofilter for 
roughly 48 hours now, so I could be way off.  :)

~ Jesse Meyer

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