planning to take the plunge on Friday

[David Relson]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 21:56:42 -0800
printer at moveupdate.com wrote:

> from .15 to .93 
> Are there any big issues out there with .93 that should make me reconsider? 
> I do not plan on updating, instead I will: 
>    dump the wordlist.db tables with bogoutil .15
>    uninstall .15
>    install .93
>    use the .93 bogoutil to load the dump file in.

Printer,

Good for you!  Bogofilter has changed a lot in the 18 months since 0.15.

I think the most visible change is in the wordlist (database) area.
Instead of separate goodlist.db and spamlist.db files there is now 1
database file, wordlist.db, which exists in a directory (known as a
"database environment").  The environment has multiple files (all
important) and the "bogoutil load" process will generate a slew of
logfiles, which you may want to archive.  Use the db_archive utility to
remove the unnecessary ones.  For a backup, use bogofilter's bf_copy
utility to copy the whole environment, i.e. directory, to a second
directory.

Beyond the database changes, bogofilter has new options which
"bogofilter --help" will display for you.  The biggest change in that is
the use of tri-state classification, i.e. spam, ham, and unsure.  You
may need to modify your scripts for the new scoring tags.  Likely you'll
want to do additional training as bogofilter's parsing changes give
importance to the various header message lines and encoded mime
attachments.

I expect you'll be happy with the new version -- once the newness wears
off and the additional training has been done.  The current bogofilter
version is doing very well at its assigned task -- distinguishing ham
from spam.

HTH!

Cheers,

David