Configuring and using DSPAM

[phoenix]

I would say that it's only worked on the ham/spam that you've fed it. Is it actually catching any spam in the junk folder? You should see results like this:

TS True Positives: 60
TI True Negatives: 59
IM False Positives: 3
SM False Negatives: 19
SC Spam Corpusfed: 0
IC Innocent Corpusfed: 0
TL Training Left: 2438
SR Spam Catch Rate: 75.95%
IR Innocent Catch Rate: 95.16%
OR Overall Rate/Accuracy: 84.40%

You can see from this that I haven't fed any spam other than the stuff that comes into Zimbra. I do, however, run the latest developer build which has a better set-up for spam catching & training and I've put DSPAM into that version. I run zmtrainsa if there's any spam that gets into my inbox but that's only a very small number of emails I receive.

I would suggest waiting for the next release of Zimbra (which I believe is coming this week) and install that then follow the instructions for DSPAM in the first post of this thread. That should be all you need to do.

I haven't bothered to install the admin gui for DSPAM yet.

[phoenix]

In addition /var/dspam/system.log will give you some info about DSPAM.

[vcolombo]

Alright, after looking over the instructions and double checking my steps I realized I had edited amavisd.conf rather than amavisd.conf.in. After editing the correct file my dspam_stats -H results look like this:

zimbra:
TS True Positives: 0
TI True Negatives: 10
IM False Positives: 0
SM False Negatives: 0
SC Spam Corpusfed: 2398
IC Innocent Corpusfed: 5551
TL Training Left: 0
SR Spam Catch Rate: 100.00%
IR Innocent Catch Rate: 100.00%
OR Overall Rate/Accuracy: 100.00%

So based on the fact that there are 10 True Negatives I'd assume it's now working correctly.

-Vince

[phoenix]

So based on the fact that there are 10 True Negatives I'd assume it's now working correctly.

-Vince

Quite likely.

I would still suggest that you have a look at the most recent version when it comes out as it will do better training than the current M2 release.

If you check in the spam that you get in your Junk folder you should see some DSPAM headers when you view the original headers and the logs will tell you if it's dropped any email because it's spam. Just keep an eye on the numbers and logs and you'll see an improvement.

Don't forget that when you do an upgrade of Zimbra you will need to make the changes for DSPAM again as the upgrade installs 'clean' config files, I've been caught out by that a couple of times.

[vcolombo]

I'd love to see inclusion of dspam in Zimbra. Perhaps offering a choice between Spamassassin and dspam during the installation?

Do you happen to know if the capability of training the filters based on users marking something as Junk through Zimbra will be included in this weeks release or is this still further off?

Oh, and I have to say this is the first time in my life that I've ever been anxiously checking my inbox hoping to receive spam! LOL.

[phoenix]

I'm with you on the choice for SA or DSPAM, IMO DSPAM is a superior product but I think Zimbra will continue using SA - unless we can convince them otherwise.

I don't really know what's in the nest version being made available but the developers build currently does filter incoming mail through spam & ham mailboxes for training. To be honest I haven't had much time lately to check exactly what it's doing, mind you as a fugitive from Windows it's probably above my head at the moment.

[KevinH]

Do you happen to know if the capability of training the filters based on users marking something as Junk through Zimbra will be included in this weeks release or is this still further off?

The ability to create spam and ham mailboxes are in the current release. You basically create 2 mailboxes that get a copy of the mail from when users use the 'Junk' and 'Not Junk' buttons.

[vcolombo]

Just to clarify, are you saying this is done automatically when the users use the Junk/Not Junk button or that they would have to manually create spam and ham folders and then it would be trained appropriately?

Thanks

[KevinH]

Just to clarify, are you saying this is done automatically when the users use the Junk/Not Junk button or that they would have to manually create spam and ham folders and then it would be trained appropriately?

Thanks

The spam and ham folders are *system* mailboxes(I said folders but meant mailboxes). So they are admin mailboxes you create to collect mail from user's hitting junk or not junk. So from a user perspective it's automatic. From the admin side you'd just create a cron job to run zmtrainsa against the two mailboxes on some regular basis.

[vcolombo]

Ok, so I now have dspam installed and properly configured. I went through the training recommendations listed in this thread, but as of yet dspam has not filtered a single message. I know for a fact that users have received messages they considered spam since I got dspam working properly.

Any ideas as to why spam messages still don't seem to be getting filtered? Also, what exactly are the proper steps to train dspam based on messages users have marked as Junk? I followed the steps to modify zmtrainsa to also train dspam but when I run the command as the zimbra user dspam gives me this message: Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or Trusted User

Also, does zmtrainsa need to be run on each individual users Junk folder? I'm assuming not since there are supposed to be system spam and ham mailboxes.

Thanks again