[ANNOUNCE] automated tuning script for bogofilter

[Greg Louis]

Announcing the release of bogotune (version 0.2.1):

The bogofilter-tuning.HOWTO that accompanies bogofilter discusses the
parameters that can be adjusted to optimize bogofilter's accuracy, and
gives some instructions as to how to determine appropriate values for
them.  The /tuning directory includes some scripts and further
documentation to help with this, but it's a somewhat complex and
tedious process.

To make it simpler, I've written a perl script called bogotune that
will completely automate the process of finding good parameters for
bogofilter, namely:
    1. The database cache size (performance)
    2. Robinson's x parameter  (accuracy)
    3. The minimum deviation   (accuracy)
    4. Robinson's s            (accuracy)
    5. The spam cutoff         (accuracy)
    6. The nonspam cutoff      (convenience)

The bogotune script will use your training database and some spam and
nonspam message files furnished by you to estimate the values you need
to assign to these six parameters.

Prerequisites:

    1. You must have a bogofilter training database built from no
        fewer than 2,000 spams and 2,000 nonspams (bigger is better),
        and the ratio of spams to nonspams must be between 0.2 and 5
        (closer to 1 is better).
    2. You must have at least 500 nonspams and 500 spams that have
        not been used in the training database.  This is a minimum,
        but results will be much more reliable if you can use several
        thousand of each.
    3. You must be using bogofilter version 0.13.6.3 or later, with
        the Robinson-Fisher algorithm.  Programs bogofilter, bogoutil
        and bogolexer must all be in your execution path.
    4. You must have perl on your system.  If /usr/bin/perl is not
        the path to a valid perl executable, you can change the first
	line of bogotune accordingly.
    5. You will need formail (supplied with procmail) to create
        message-count files from mbox-format ones.

Download:

    http://www.bgl.nu/bogofilter/bogotune-0.2.1.tgz

(Future releases of bogofilter will include the then-current
bogotune package.)

Installation and use are described in README.bogotune and in the
manpages; these documents are included in the package.

Author:

    Greg Louis <glouis at dynamicro.on.ca>

2003-06-19.

-- 
| G r e g  L o u i s          | gpg public key: finger     |
|   http://www.bgl.nu/~glouis |   glouis at consultronics.com |
| http://wecanstopspam.org in signatures fights junk email |