Migrating from SpamAssassin to Bogofilter

[Kip Warner]

On Wed, 2013-06-05 at 08:43 +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> Greetings,

Hey Matthias,

> I have just tried to find information on the bayes_toks format, but have
> not been able to find any, so I cannot judge if there is even a remote
> possibility of converting the spamassassin database for use with
> bogofilter.  (I suppose reading spamassassin source code is possible,
> but I wonder if it is worth the effort.)

I thought of that, but like you, I figured that's probably overkill and
neither of us likely have time.

> I suggest that, before you flip the switch, you collect a few days'
> worth of spam rather than deleting so you have a reasonable amount of
> up-to-date spam around to train bogofilter with (on the assumption that
> you keep a reasonable amount of good mail anyways).
> 
> We have traditionally recommended that you train bogofilter roughly with
> the same amount of spam as good mail.

Right now I'm using Bogofilter under Evolution. Although I've already
cleared out my spam since switching over, I wonder if I could at least
train it with non-spam, ham - or whatever the bogofilter nomenclature
would have it?

> As spam changes over time, I wonder if old data is of much use, or if it
> just consumes disk space with little effect.

I usually just delete the spam from the spam folder.

> Note that bogofilter is a purely Bayesian classifier, and does not do
> any of the other checks SpamAssassin does.

Yes, I understand. But given that my SpamAssassin installation is so
broken right now and upstream hasn't been much help, I really don't have
any choice but to switch.

> (I also tried spamassassin's Bayesian mode a few times and found it to
> be awkwardly slow -- not sure if that has changed.)

I don't know what mode I was using, but I do know that it was pretty
slow.

> HTH - feel free to ask more questions as you move along.

Thanks Matthias. =)

-- 
Kip Warner -- Software Engineer
OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred
http://www.thevertigo.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://www.bogofilter.org/pipermail/bogofilter/attachments/20130605/a77dec88/attachment.sig>