SpamAssassin has phrases that it looks for that come about from the development team running genetic algorithms to see what and how to score sections of text from messages. The ones that win out in the genetic process make it to the top phrase count. (the bayesian analysis will work on chars or phrases - you just don't want to make it only distinct words - you want it to be effectively statistics on the characters - spaces and bits - then it can learn and just use statistics to your favor)

But that in itself isn't what makes SpamAssassin really good - if you sort out your spam and nonspam into folders and set it to learn on those - then it will learn on those (although that makes it slower).

I'm a big fan of spamassassin and use the most recent code - although it doesn't seemed to have changed much lately. I went from 500 spams a day, down to 100, and then after tweaking spamassassin got down to one a day that would sneak through, then one a week - and after a few months of it I now no longer see any of my spam (unless I go and look into the file I have it sorted out into).
For months I checked to see if it was grabbing mail that it shouldn't be - and it only did once, and that was because my mom wasn't on the whitelist and her dial-up Mindspring account was getting enough points to make it think it was spam.

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There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Spam filtering regexp - keyword countermeasure countermeasure by AssFace
in thread Spam filtering regexp - keyword countermeasure countermeasure by John M. Dlugosz

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