Basic Bogofilter maintenance examples?

[s. keeling]

Hi.  I'm using Debian stable/woody and the bogofilter from
www.backports.org, 0.17.4-0.backports.org.1; and yes, I suppose it is
ancient.  I'll be happy to upgrade when Sarge goes stable.  :-)

Anyway, I've been wading through the FAQ, manpage, and archives looking
for bogofilter/bogotune/bogo* usage examples, and I'm not getting very
far.  Care to suggest some?  I found a bit in the FAQ
(http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/faq.shtml#compact-database), and
that worked nicely (49 Mb --> 34 Mb).  Other possible courses of
action seem a bit less than simple to me:

  - How is "bogoutil -m" used?  Is it redirection as in the
    "compact-database" example (above):

       bogoutil -a 200400101 -m ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db > \
            ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db.new

    or does bogoutil work on wordlist.db itself without the re-direct?

  - Ditto for "-n"?

  - Should I "-n" _then_ "-m"?

  - Is that "-a" option (for 1Jan2004) correct?  Is there a better way
    to specify it?

fwiw, bogofilter's called by procmail with "-p -u -e", and any
errors/misclassifications are handled manually with a few mutt macros:

   # de-register prior classification as spam - Good
   #
   macro index G "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -Sn\n"
   macro pager G "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -Sn\n"
   #
   # de-register prior classification as ham  - Bad
   #
   macro index B "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -Ns\n"
   macro pager B "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -Ns\n"
   #
   # classify as ham                          - Alright
   #
   macro index A "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -n\n"
   macro pager A "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -n\n"
   #
   # classify as spam                         - Spam
   #
   macro index S "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -s\n"
   macro pager S "|/usr/bin/bogofilter -s\n"

so "BS" tells bf to recognise spam as what it really is.  :-)

Any suggestions re: tweaking the values below would be welcome as
well.  Much appreciated, everybody.  It's a nice, lightweight system.

  ---------------------------------------------------------------
(0) infidel /home/keeling_ bogofilter -Q     
# bogofilter version 0.17.4

robx        = 0.415000  # (4.15e-01)
robs        = 0.010000  # (1.00e-02)
min_dev     = 0.100000  # (1.00e-01)
ham_cutoff  = 0.000000  # (0.00e+00)
spam_cutoff = 0.950000  # (9.50e-01)

block_on_subnets  = no
charset_default   = us-ascii
replace_nonascii_characters = no
stats_in_header   = yes
thresh_update     = 0.000000
timestamp         = yes

terse             = no
spam_header_name  = X-Bogosity
spam_subject_tag  = 
unsure_subject_tag = 
header_format     = %h: %c, tests=bogofilter, spamicity=%p, version=%v
terse_format      = %1.1c %f
log_header_format = %h: %c, spamicity=%p, version=%v
log_update_format = register-%r, %w words, %m messages
spamicity_tags    = Yes, No
spamicity_formats = %0.6f, %0.6f
(0) infidel /home/keeling_ bogoutil -w ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db .MSG_COUNT 
                                 spam   good
.MSG_COUNT                      11740  72794
  ---------------------------------------------------------------



-- 
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*)               http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling 
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