nan in bogofilter stats

[Stephen Davies]

I use bogofilter in two ways: via Amavis milter/amavisd and explicitly from a 
cron job that uses -Ns to un/reregister any spam that reaches my inbox and I 
then save to a separate area.

Amavis is configured to register both ham and spam.

I supposed that the -Ns could theoretically result in a zero good count but 
the current .MSG_COUNTS is:

.MSG_COUNT 276769 4239 20090407

so it looks unlikely.

I shall see if my new daily backup job provides any pointers.

Cheers and thanks,
Stephen


 On Tuesday 07 April 2009 12:44:59 David Relson wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Apr 2009 10:37:21 +0930
>
> Stephen Davies wrote:
> > Thanks David. I shall set up a similar cron job.
> >
> > The zero count does not seem to come from a missing .MSG_COUNT but
> > from an explicit entry such as:
> >
> > .MSG_COUNT 276248 0 20090322
> >
> > How can this come about?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Stephen
>
> Off-hand ???  I dunno.
>
> .MSG_COUNT is bogofilter's special token for keeping track of how many
> good and bad messages have been registered into the wordlist.  As a
> quick rule of thumb, it should have a good count higher than _any_
> other token's good count and a bad counter higher ...
>
> In normal usage as more and more messages are registered with
> bogofilter the counts just keep increasing.  The exception is that
> bogofilter's -N and -S flags cause a decrease.
>
> A scenario that would give a zero "good" count is: (1) register just a
> few ham messages and (2) unregister that same number of ham messages.
>
> If one registers large quantities of the incoming ham and spam,
> then .MSG_COUNT won't ever have a ham or spam count that's even close
> to zero.
>
> Some interesting question are:  How do you use bogofilter?  Do
> you ever register ham?  Do you just register spam?  Do you use the "-N"
> flag?
>
> For what it's worth, I've been using the "-u" (auto-update) flag for 6
> or so years.  My mail server's .MSG_COUNT token has spam and ham counts
> of 1,624,551 and 181,079.  The 10::1 ratio is higher than we
> recommended (6 or 7 years ago) but gives good results (with approx
> 99.9% of the spam getting caught).  Of course, "-u" has a caveat:  one
> must be conscientious about correcting errors (false positives and
> false negatives).
>
> Anyhow, I've rambled on long enough.
>
> Hope that this is of value to you.
>
> Regards,
>
> David



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