What is spam? (was: [bogofilter] ESF and redundancy)

[David Relson]

On Tue, 11 May 2004 09:25:18 -0700
Jef Poskanzer wrote:

> >I concur.  Bogofilter needs to be able to filter any kind of unwanted
> >mail.  If I register all emails from the bogofilter mailing list,
> >then it should filter this list, no questions asked.  Virii spam are
> >still spam... they are sent en masse to unwilling recipients with a
> >payload, but instead of a marketing message, the payload is a virus
> >(read this in the voice of Agent Smith ;).  They should be
> >filterable.
> 
> Yeah, but.  I get a lot more email worms than most people (about two
> per second), and when I was using bogofilter to get rid of them what I
> found is that it got real good at blocking the worms but was getting
> not so good at blocking regular spam.  See, the overwhelming number of
> worms was skewing the statistics.

Hi Jef,

Sounds like you're using auto-update (or other mechanism to register
_all_ spam).  Along with "-u", I have "thresh_update=0.01" in my config
file.  It tells bogofilter to skip autoupdating if the spamicity is
within 0.01 of 0.000000 (surely ham) or 1.000000 (surely ham).  This
capability was added to slow the database's growth rate.  It will (I
believe) also effect skewing effects.

Regards,

David