sa-learnp - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

sa-learn - train SpamAssassin's Bayesian classifier

SYNOPSIS

sa-learn [options] [file]...

sa-learn [options] --dump [ all | data | magic ]

Options:

--ham Learn messages as ham (non-spam)
--spam Learn messages as spam
--forget Forget a message
--use-ignores Use bayes_ignore_from and bayes_ignore_to
--sync Synchronize the database and the journal if needed
--force-expire Force a database sync and expiry run
--dbpath <path> Allows commandline override (in bayes_path form)
for where to read the Bayes DB from
--dump [all|data|magic] Display the contents of the Bayes database
Takes optional argument for what to display
--regexp <re> For dump only, specifies which tokens to
dump based on a regular expression.
-f file, --folders=file Read list of files/directories from file
--dir Ignored; historical compatibility
--file Ignored; historical compatibility
--mbox Input sources are in mbox format
--mbx Input sources are in mbx format
--max-size <b> Skip messages larger than b bytes;
defaults to 256 KB, 0 implies no limit
--showdots Show progress using dots
--progress Show progress using progress bar
--no-sync Skip synchronizing the database and journal
after learning
-L, --local Operate locally, no network accesses
--import Migrate data from older version/non DB_File
based databases
--clear Wipe out existing database
--backup Backup, to STDOUT, existing database
--restore <filename> Restore a database from filename
-u username, --username=username
Override username taken from the runtime
environment, used with SQL
-C path, --configpath=path, --config-file=path
Path to standard configuration dir
-p prefs, --prefspath=file, --prefs-file=file
Set user preferences file
--siteconfigpath=path Path for site configs
(default: /etc/spamassassin)
--cf='config line' Additional line of configuration
-D, --debug [area=n,...] Print debugging messages
-V, --version Print version
-h, --help Print usage message

DESCRIPTION

Given a typical selection of your incoming mail classified as spam or ham (non-spam), this
tool will feed each mail to SpamAssassin, allowing it to 'learn' what signs are likely to
mean spam, and which are likely to mean ham.

Simply run this command once for each of your mail folders, and it will ''learn'' from the
mail therein.

Note that csh-style globbing in the mail folder names is supported; in other words,
listing a folder name as "*" will scan every folder that matches. See
"Mail::SpamAssassin::ArchiveIterator" for more details.

SpamAssassin remembers which mail messages it has learnt already, and will not re-learn
those messages again, unless you use the --forget option. Messages learnt as spam will
have SpamAssassin markup removed, on the fly.

If you make a mistake and scan a mail as ham when it is spam, or vice versa, simply rerun
this command with the correct classification, and the mistake will be corrected.
SpamAssassin will automatically 'forget' the previous indications.

Users of "spamd" who wish to perform training remotely, over a network, should investigate
the "spamc -L" switch.

OPTIONS

--ham
Learn the input message(s) as ham. If you have previously learnt any of the messages
as spam, SpamAssassin will forget them first, then re-learn them as ham.
Alternatively, if you have previously learnt them as ham, it'll skip them this time
around. If the messages have already been filtered through SpamAssassin, the learner
will ignore any modifications SpamAssassin may have made.

--spam
Learn the input message(s) as spam. If you have previously learnt any of the
messages as ham, SpamAssassin will forget them first, then re-learn them as spam.
Alternatively, if you have previously learnt them as spam, it'll skip them this time
around. If the messages have already been filtered through SpamAssassin, the learner
will ignore any modifications SpamAssassin may have made.

--folders=filename, -f filename
sa-learn will read in the list of folders from the specified file, one folder per line
in the file. If the folder is prefixed with "ham:type:" or "spam:type:", sa-learn
will learn that folder appropriately, otherwise the folders will be assumed to be of
the type specified by --ham or --spam.

"type" above is optional, but is the same as the standard for ArchiveIterator: mbox,
mbx, dir, file, or detect (the default if not specified).

--mbox
sa-learn will read in the file(s) containing the emails to be learned, and will
process them in mbox format (one or more emails per file).

--mbx
sa-learn will read in the file(s) containing the emails to be learned, and will
process them in mbx format (one or more emails per file).

--use-ignores
Don't learn the message if a from address matches configuration file item
"bayes_ignore_from" or a to address matches "bayes_ignore_to". The option might be
used when learning from a large file of messages from which the hammy spam messages or
spammy ham messages have not been removed.

--sync
Synchronize the journal and databases. Upon successfully syncing the database with
the entries in the journal, the journal file is removed.

--force-expire
Forces an expiry attempt, regardless of whether it may be necessary or not. Note:
This doesn't mean any tokens will actually expire. Please see the EXPIRATION section
below.

Note: "--force-expire" also causes the journal data to be synchronized into the Bayes
databases.

--forget
Forget a given message previously learnt.

--dbpath
Allows a commandline override of the bayes_path configuration option.

--dump option
Display the contents of the Bayes database. Without an option or with the all option,
all magic tokens and data tokens will be displayed. magic will only display magic
tokens, and data will only display the data tokens.

Can also use the --regexp RE option to specify which tokens to display based on a
regular expression.

--clear
Clear an existing Bayes database by removing all traces of the database.

WARNING: This is destructive and should be used with care.

--backup
Performs a dump of the Bayes database in machine/human readable format.

The dump will include token and seen data. It is suitable for input back into the
--restore command.

--restore=filename
Performs a restore of the Bayes database defined by filename.

WARNING: This is a destructive operation, previous Bayes data will be wiped out.

-h, --help
Print help message and exit.

-u username, --username=username
If specified this username will override the username taken from the runtime
environment. You can use this option to specify users in a virtual user configuration
when using SQL as the Bayes backend.

NOTE: This option will not change to the given username, it will only attempt to act
on behalf of that user. Because of this you will need to have proper permissions to
be able to change files owned by username. In the case of SQL this generally is not a
problem.

-C path, --configpath=path, --config-file=path
Use the specified path for locating the distributed configuration files. Ignore the
default directories (usually "/usr/share/spamassassin" or similar).

--siteconfigpath=path
Use the specified path for locating site-specific configuration files. Ignore the
default directories (usually "/etc/spamassassin" or similar).

--cf='config line'
Add additional lines of configuration directly from the command-line, parsed after the
configuration files are read. Multiple --cf arguments can be used, and each will be
considered a separate line of configuration.

-p prefs, --prefspath=prefs, --prefs-file=prefs
Read user score preferences from prefs (usually "$HOME/.spamassassin/user_prefs").

--progress
Prints a progress bar (to STDERR) showing the current progress. In the case where no
valid terminal is found this option will behave very much like the --showdots option.

-D [area,...], --debug [area,...]
Produce debugging output. If no areas are listed, all debugging information is
printed. Diagnostic output can also be enabled for each area individually; area is the
area of the code to instrument. For example, to produce diagnostic output on bayes,
learn, and dns, use:

spamassassin -D bayes,learn,dns

For more information about which areas (also known as channels) are available, please
see the documentation at:

C<http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DebugChannels>

Higher priority informational messages that are suitable for logging in normal
circumstances are available with an area of "info".

--no-sync
Skip the slow synchronization step which normally takes place after changing database
entries. If you plan to learn from many folders in a batch, or to learn many
individual messages one-by-one, it is faster to use this switch and run "sa-learn
--sync" once all the folders have been scanned.

Clarification: The state of --no-sync overrides the bayes_learn_to_journal
configuration option. If not specified, sa-learn will learn to the database directly.
If specified, sa-learn will learn to the journal file.

Note: --sync and --no-sync can be specified on the same commandline, which is slightly
confusing. In this case, the --no-sync option is ignored since there is no learn
operation.

-L, --local
Do not perform any network accesses while learning details about the mail messages.
This will speed up the learning process, but may result in a slightly lower accuracy.

Note that this is currently ignored, as current versions of SpamAssassin will not
perform network access while learning; but future versions may.

--import
If you previously used SpamAssassin's Bayesian learner without the "DB_File" module
installed, it will have created files in other formats, such as "GDBM_File",
"NDBM_File", or "SDBM_File". This switch allows you to migrate that old data into the
"DB_File" format. It will overwrite any data currently in the "DB_File".

Can also be used with the --dbpath path option to specify the location of the Bayes
files to use.

MIGRATION

There are now multiple backend storage modules available for storing user's bayesian data.
As such you might want to migrate from one backend to another. Here is a simple procedure
for migrating from one backend to another.

Note that if you have individual user databases you will have to perform a similar
procedure for each one of them.

sa-learn --sync
This will sync any outstanding journal entries

sa-learn --backup > backup.txt
This will save all your Bayes data to a plain text file.

sa-learn --clear
This is optional, but good to do to clear out the old database.

Repeat!
At this point, if you have multiple databases, you should perform the procedure above
for each of them. (i.e. each user's database needs to be backed up before continuing.)

Switch backends
Once you have backed up all databases you can update your configuration for the new
database backend. This will involve at least the bayes_store_module config option and
may involve some additional config options depending on what is required by the
module. (For example, you may need to configure an SQL database.)

sa-learn --restore backup.txt
Again, you need to do this for every database.

If you are migrating to SQL you can make use of the -u <username> option in sa-learn to
populate each user's database. Otherwise, you must run sa-learn as the user who database
you are restoring.

INTRODUCTION TO BAYESIAN FILTERING

(Thanks to Michael Bell for this section!)

For a more lengthy description of how this works, go to http://www.paulgraham.com/ and see
"A Plan for Spam". It's reasonably readable, even if statistics make me break out in
hives.

The short semi-inaccurate version: Given training, a spam heuristics engine can take the
most "spammy" and "hammy" words and apply probabilistic analysis. Furthermore, once given
a basis for the analysis, the engine can continue to learn iteratively by applying both
the non-Bayesian and Bayesian rulesets together to create evolving "intelligence".

SpamAssassin 2.50 and later supports Bayesian spam analysis, in the form of the BAYES
rules. This is a new feature, quite powerful, and is disabled until enough messages have
been learnt.

The pros of Bayesian spam analysis:

Can greatly reduce false positives and false negatives.
It learns from your mail, so it is tailored to your unique e-mail flow.

Once it starts learning, it can continue to learn from SpamAssassin and improve over time.

And the cons:

A decent number of messages are required before results are useful for ham/spam
determination.
It's hard to explain why a message is or isn't marked as spam.
i.e.: a straightforward rule, that matches, say, "VIAGRA" is easy to understand. If it
generates a false positive or false negative, it is fairly easy to understand why.

With Bayesian analysis, it's all probabilities - "because the past says it is likely
as this falls into a probabilistic distribution common to past spam in your systems".
Tell that to your users! Tell that to the client when he asks "what can I do to
change this". (By the way, the answer in this case is "use whitelisting".)

It will take disk space and memory.
The databases it maintains take quite a lot of resources to store and use.

GETTING STARTED

Still interested? Ok, here's the guidelines for getting this working.

First a high-level overview:

Build a significant sample of both ham and spam.
I suggest several thousand of each, placed in SPAM and HAM directories or mailboxes.
Yes, you MUST hand-sort this - otherwise the results won't be much better than
SpamAssassin on its own. Verify the spamminess/haminess of EVERY message. You're
urged to avoid using a publicly available corpus (sample) - this must be taken from
YOUR mail server, if it is to be statistically useful. Otherwise, the results may be
pretty skewed.

Use this tool to teach SpamAssassin about these samples, like so:
sa-learn --spam /path/to/spam/folder
sa-learn --ham /path/to/ham/folder
...

Let SpamAssassin proceed, learning stuff. When it finds ham and spam it will add the
"interesting tokens" to the database.

If you need SpamAssassin to forget about specific messages, use the --forget option.
This can be applied to either ham or spam that has run through the sa-learn processes.
It's a bit of a hammer, really, lowering the weighting of the specific tokens in that
message (only if that message has been processed before).

Learning from single messages uses a command like this:
sa-learn --ham --no-sync mailmessage

This is handy for binding to a key in your mail user agent. It's very fast, as all
the time-consuming stuff is deferred until you run with the "--sync" option.

Autolearning is enabled by default
If you don't have a corpus of mail saved to learn, you can let SpamAssassin
automatically learn the mail that you receive. If you are autolearning from scratch,
the amount of mail you receive will determine how long until the BAYES_* rules are
activated.

EFFECTIVE TRAINING

Learning filters require training to be effective. If you don't train them, they won't
work. In addition, you need to train them with new messages regularly to keep them up-to-
date, or their data will become stale and impact accuracy.

You need to train with both spam and ham mails. One type of mail alone will not have any
effect.

Note that if your mail folders contain things like forwarded spam, discussions of spam-
catching rules, etc., this will cause trouble. You should avoid scanning those messages
if possible. (An easy way to do this is to move them aside, into a folder which is not
scanned.)

If the messages you are learning from have already been filtered through SpamAssassin, the
learner will compensate for this. In effect, it learns what each message would look like
if you had run "spamassassin -d" over it in advance.

Another thing to be aware of, is that typically you should aim to train with at least 1000
messages of spam, and 1000 ham messages, if possible. More is better, but anything over
about 5000 messages does not improve accuracy significantly in our tests.

Be careful that you train from the same source -- for example, if you train on old spam,
but new ham mail, then the classifier will think that a mail with an old date stamp is
likely to be spam.

It's also worth noting that training with a very small quantity of ham, will produce
atrocious results. You should aim to train with at least the same amount (or more if
possible!) of ham data than spam.

On an on-going basis, it is best to keep training the filter to make sure it has fresh
data to work from. There are various ways to do this:

1. Supervised learning
This means keeping a copy of all or most of your mail, separated into spam and ham
piles, and periodically re-training using those. It produces the best results, but
requires more work from you, the user.

(An easy way to do this, by the way, is to create a new folder for 'deleted' messages,
and instead of deleting them from other folders, simply move them in there instead.
Then keep all spam in a separate folder and never delete it. As long as you remember
to move misclassified mails into the correct folder set, it is easy enough to keep up
to date.)

2. Unsupervised learning from Bayesian classification
Another way to train is to chain the results of the Bayesian classifier back into the
training, so it reinforces its own decisions. This is only safe if you then retrain
it based on any errors you discover.

SpamAssassin does not support this method, due to experimental results which strongly
indicate that it does not work well, and since Bayes is only one part of the resulting
score presented to the user (while Bayes may have made the wrong decision about a
mail, it may have been overridden by another system).

3. Unsupervised learning from SpamAssassin rules
Also called 'auto-learning' in SpamAssassin. Based on statistical analysis of the
SpamAssassin success rates, we can automatically train the Bayesian database with a
certain degree of confidence that our training data is accurate.

It should be supplemented with some supervised training in addition, if possible.

This is the default, but can be turned off by setting the SpamAssassin configuration
parameter "bayes_auto_learn" to 0.

4. Mistake-based training
This means training on a small number of mails, then only training on messages that
SpamAssassin classifies incorrectly. This works, but it takes longer to get it right
than a full training session would.

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