Mailing List Archive: SpamAssassin: users

Seeing Bayes token matches for an email

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Bowie_Bailey at BUC

May 23, 2008, 9:29 AM

Post #1 of 4 (129 views)
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Seeing Bayes token matches for an email

I could have sworn that there was a way to do this, but I can't find it.

I have an email that does not look at all spammy to me. On an account
where Bayes is trained manually (no auto-learn at all), it got marked
with BAYES_99. Is there a way to see what tokens Bayes is keying on? I
tried running it through "spamassassin -D", but I didn't see it there.

Thanks

--
Bowie

felicity at apache

May 23, 2008, 9:40 AM

Post #2 of 4 (117 views)
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Re: Seeing Bayes token matches for an email [In reply to]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:29:21PM -0400, Bowie Bailey wrote:
> I have an email that does not look at all spammy to me. On an account
> where Bayes is trained manually (no auto-learn at all), it got marked
> with BAYES_99. Is there a way to see what tokens Bayes is keying on? I
> tried running it through "spamassassin -D", but I didn't see it there.

"spamassassin -D bayes"

It's too noisy for the standard debug output, but the bayes channel will give
you the full info.

--
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Bowie_Bailey at BUC

May 23, 2008, 12:19 PM

Post #3 of 4 (115 views)
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RE: Seeing Bayes token matches for an email [In reply to]

Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:29:21PM -0400, Bowie Bailey wrote:
> > I have an email that does not look at all spammy to me. On an
> > account where Bayes is trained manually (no auto-learn at all), it
> > got marked with BAYES_99. Is there a way to see what tokens Bayes
> > is keying on? I tried running it through "spamassassin -D", but I
> > didn't see it there.
>
> "spamassassin -D bayes"
>
> It's too noisy for the standard debug output, but the bayes channel
> will give you the full info.

I thought I already tried that. Oh well...

That gives me the info, now how do I interpret it?

[26088] dbg: bayes: token 'fax' => 0.0466125715533146
[26088] dbg: bayes: token 'may' => 0.951423151521604
[26088] dbg: bayes: token 'send' => 0.947622860965791
[26088] dbg: bayes: token 'sent' => 0.0562793425809908

The numbers seem to go from 0 to 1. Is 0 non-spammy and 1 spammy, or is
there more to it than that? If that's the case, there are quite a few
common words that bayes doesn't seem to like.

--
Bowie

jhardin at impsec

May 23, 2008, 1:32 PM

Post #4 of 4 (111 views)
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RE: Seeing Bayes token matches for an email [In reply to]

On Fri, 23 May 2008, Bowie Bailey wrote:

> That gives me the info, now how do I interpret it?
>
> [26088] dbg: bayes: token 'fax' => 0.0466125715533146
> [26088] dbg: bayes: token 'may' => 0.951423151521604
> [26088] dbg: bayes: token 'send' => 0.947622860965791
> [26088] dbg: bayes: token 'sent' => 0.0562793425809908
>
> The numbers seem to go from 0 to 1. Is 0 non-spammy and 1 spammy, or is
> there more to it than that? If that's the case, there are quite a few
> common words that bayes doesn't seem to like.

Remember, Bayes interprets tokens in relation to other tokens. Those
high-scoring tokens may be high-scoring due to context.

--
John Hardin KA7OHZ http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
jhardin[at]impsec.org FALaholic #11174 pgpk -a jhardin[at]impsec.org
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