Topic: Spamassassin autolearn

[CmdLn]

The default for spamassassin autolearn is disabled in SME. Is this the recommended config?

[guest22]

Yes, all defaults are recommended. If you feel it should be different, please create a bug report with your motivation.
TIA

[CmdLn]

I am trying to decide if I should enable bayes or not. From your answer it seems I should not, do you know the reasons for having the default autolearn disabled in SME?

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

autolearn will learn before you are able to see the mail and decide what it should be.
As a result, on its own it tends to create false positive and false negatives, and tends to let you with more spam than before and make it harder to get ride of them.

A better approach is to learn from spam /junk folder after user intervention.
see https://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10127

also have a look at : https://wiki.contribs.org/Learn for current solution

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

to note by default untill now if you enable Bayes learning, auto lean is enabled unless you manually create a template custom.

Just added the default behaviour to not enable the auto_learn unless specifically asked for : https://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10360

the rpm will be in smetest in few minutes, and smeupdates-testing in few hours. This need to be tested before using in production.

[mmccarn]

Yes, all defaults are recommended. If you feel it should be different, please create a bug report with your motivation.
TIA

I think that spam filtering is a bit more nuanced, and doesn't lend itself to a single universal default configuration.

A default SME server, for example, has dnsbl, rhsbl, (and now) uribl disabled -- all standard and very effective spam fighting tools.

Rather than defaulting to the optimum spam fighting configuration, SME server defaults to a configuration with the best chance that email will be received successfully.  Once the system, ISP, and DNS have been properly configured the server admin can enable the various tools available to improve spam filtering.