Re: train-good and train-spam; cron error

John Chandler wrote:
>     The documentation still recommends using "good" and "spam" 
>     for the initial training and for later corrrective training.

If you use train for incoming email then you should use train-good and 
train-spam for corrections.  Using the good/spam commands would not hurt 
anything but could increase database size.


>     Would the use of "train-good" or "train-spam"
>     in initially training spamprobe 
>     or in later corrective sessions be appropriate,
>     in order better to control the size of the database?

Once 1.1 is finished (needs documentation changes prior to release) the 
proper way to build an initial database will be the auto-train command. 
  Until then I recomment using the good and spam commands.

auto-train will do its best to minimize the database size during 
training and will train on your saved hams and spams in a balanced way 
that should improve starting accuracy.


>     If not, could "train-good" and "train-spam" perhaps be used 
>     for just the latter part of the initial training?
>     (That is, train on one small "good" file and one small "spam" file,
>     then switch to "train-good" and "train-spam" and train some more.)

As long as you mix up your mail using train-good and train-spam would be 
fine.  By that I mean if you just have two buge files (mail.good and 
mail.spam) then using train-good and train-spam will give poor accuracy 
to start but if you have 5 or 6 ham files and 5 or 6 spam files then 
training with train-good and train-spam should work well if you 
alternate them (i.e. train one on good file, then one spam file, repeat)


> 2)  My cron job ran fine for seven months,
>     but recently it has given the following error in every run.

Your sp_words file is corrupt.  If you retrain and see the exact same 
error then maybe you have an email that is crashing SP?  If that's the 
case and it's reproducible then let me know and I can try to fix the bug.


>     We are running spamprobe 1.0 on Solaris 9.
>     Any suggestions of things to try?

Build a new sp_words file and run db_verify on it to see if it's 
corrupted immediately after the rebuild.  If it is then we'd want to 
know what's causing that to happen.  Note that BDB is vulnerable to 
problems if you ^C during an update.

You might want to give the latest 1.1x release a try.  It's very stable 
and has 1.0's features but a better (I think) parser than 1.0.  It also 
has some improvements that try to clean up the database more cleanly in 
the event of improper termination of SP during an update.

If possible switching to PBL would be a good idea.  PBL seems to be much 
more robust than berkeley db.  I'm thinking of adding QDBM support over 
the holiday to see if it's a reasonable alternative to PBL and BDB.

All the best,
++Brian


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