Peter's Blog 1.9.2004

2004-09-01

Living with Spamassassin

Spamassassin at work is detecting spam nicely, no false positives so far although some false negatives are getting through. I don't have a big enough spam or ham corpus to get the bayesian spam filter running but when I do this could make a difference.

I have created three IMAP folders for spam:

Possibly This holds messages with a spam score > 5. Most spams come into this category. Messages are moved here by a procmail filter.
Definitely This holds messages with a spam score > 12. Messages are moved here by a procmail filter.
Categorically I use this for spam that isn't detected. When these arrive in the inbox I move them here manually. I also move messages from the 'Possibly' folder to here.

I then have a cron job running each night to run sa-learn --spam on the 'categorically' folder and sa-learn --ham on my inbox. It runs on the 'cur' subfolder but not the 'new' subfolder so it should not pick up spam that arrives when I am not around to approve it.

The Definitely spams are not added to the bayesian filter. I think this is best, it avoids reinforcing prejudices which is not a good thing.

The spam I receive has already been through the companys surfcontrol spam filter. Draw your own conclusions.

Something I must do sometime is extract 250M of old emails from my outlook archive and put them on the IMAP server. I could do this by hooking Outlook up to the IMAP server and just moving the messages but I have a gut feeling that this will take hours and involve a lot of pain.

At home I must figure out a way to get my old email out of the clutches of Intellimail so that I can uninstall it.

posted at 10:48:48    #    comment []    trackback []
 

BackupBuddyVFS to the rescue

Last time I looked at the Palm T2 the battery was flat so I put it on charge. Turned it on this morning to find out time of an appointment and the thing was totally reset, back to initial settings.

It was my first opportunity to try out BackupBuddyVFS Restore and it has worked perfectly. Thumbs up for that. It may be that the auto-backups at 5pm everyday are what flattened the battery but it has made up for it.

The digitiser on my palm is definitely flaky. The initial calibrate thing asks me to tap on the centre of three crosses and I have to do this many times before it will accept the calibration. It is very fussy about precisely where I tap on the screen. For examplem if I want to click on a button, sometimes I have to tap just above the button to get a hit.

posted at 08:47:12    #    comment []    trackback []
September 2004
MoTuWeThFrSaSu
   1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930   
Aug
2004
 Oct
2004

A blog documenting Peter's dabblings with Python, Gentoo Linux and any other cool toys he comes across.

XML-Image Letterimage

© 2004, Peter Wilkinson

Bisi and me