Spam Assassin Training

I've used the same email address since 1997. Until recently, I have never had a problem receiving excessive spam, thanks to SpamAssassin running on my mail server. I'm not sure why, but lately I noticed much more spam getting through the filter. After a little digging, I discovered a great tutorial on training SpamAssassin to recognize the spam you receive more effectively. You must create separate mail boxes to contain ONLY spam or ONLY ham. You can then train SpamAssassin with the appropriate commands. Here is a summary of Faisal's tutorial. I highly recommend reading the entire page since there are a few caveats.

The general format is:

$ sa-learn --no-sync [--spam or --ham] --mbox [folder]

For exmaple, assuming you've shoved all spam into a spam folder in the ~/mail directory:

$ sa-learn --no-sync --spam --mbox ~/mail/spam

And assuming you've filed ham into several folders (in this example, "friends" and "lists", also in the ~/mail directory):

$ sa-learn --no-sync --ham --mbox ~/mail/friends
$ sa-learn --no-sync --ham --mbox ~/mail/lists

You'll also want to clear all spam out of your inbox, and file that. Most systems using the mbox format store the inbox in a special location. On Obscure, the location is /var/spool/mail/[userid]. For example, for me the command is:

$ sa-learn --no-sync --ham --mbox /var/spool/mail/faisal

Once you've trained all the folders you're using, you'll need to run this command to tell sa-learn to clean up after itself and rebuild its database:

sa-learn --sync

If you'd like to see what's currently in the database, do:

sa-learn --dump magic