SpamProbe v1.4 README LEGALESE Burton Computer Corporation http://www.burton-computer.com Copyright (C) 2002,2003,2004,2005,2006 Burton Computer Corporation ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This program is open source software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Q Public License (QPL) version 1.0. Use of this software in whole or in part, including linking it (modified or unmodified) into other programs is subject to the terms of the QPL. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the Q Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the Q Public License along with this program; see the file LICENSE.txt. If not, visit the Burton Computer Corporation or CoolDevTools web site QPL pages at: http://www.burton-computer.com/qpl.html INTRODUCTION Welcome to SpamProbe! Are you tired of the constant bombardment of your inbox by unwanted email pushing everything from porn to get rich quick schemes? Have you tried other spam filters but become disenchanted with them when you realized that their manually generated rule sets weren't updated fast enough to keep up with spammers wording changes? Or that they generated unwanted false positive scores? SpamProbe operates on a different basis entirely. Instead of using pattern matching and a set of human generated rules SpamProbe relies on a Bayesian analysis of the frequency of words used in spam and non-spam emails received by an individual person. The process is completely automatic and tailors itself to the kinds of emails that each person receives. My work on SpamProbe was inspired by an excellent article by Paul Graham. He describes the basic idea and his results. You can read his article here: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html I highly recommend reading the article and the other spam related links on his site for excellent insights into why spam is a problem and how you can defeat it. Of course running SpamProbe is an excellent step! :-) FEATURES * Spam detection using Bayesian analysis of terms contained in each email. Words used often in spams but not in good email tend to indicate that a message is spam. * Written in C++ for good performance. Database access using PBL or BerkeleyDB for quick startup and fast term count retrieval. * Recognition and decoding of MIME attachments in quoted-printable and base64 encoding. Automatically skips non-text attachments. MIME decoding enables SpamProbe to make decisions based on words in the emails rather than base64 gobbledigook. * Counts two word phrases as well as single words for higher precision. * Counts words in from, to, cc, received, and subject headers separately for improved accuracy since some words are better indicators of spam when they appear in the subject than in the body. Received headers after the first are counted separately from first Received header since they are likely to be forged in spams. * Ignores HTML tags in emails for scoring purposes unless the -h command line option is used. Many spams use HTML and few humans do so HTML tends to become a powerful recognizer of spams. However in the author's opinion this also substantially increases the likelihood of false positives if someone does send a non-spam email containing HTML tags. SpamProbe does pull urls from inside of html tags however since those tend to be spammer specific. * Supports MBOX, MBX and Maildir mailbox formats. * Analyzes image attachments to extract useful terms for scoring. This catches the majority of spams with only images and no words. * Locks mboxes and databases using fcntl file locking to avoid problems when multiple emails arrive simultaneously. Can optionally be compiled to use Berkeley DB's environment functions to provide better interaction with db_dump, db_verify, etc. * Scores only the Received, Subject, To, From, and Cc headers. All other headers are ignored to make it hard for spammers to hide non-spammy words in X- headers to fool the filter. The -H command line option can be used to override this. * Supports Content-Length: field in mbox headers. This can be disabled using -Y option to use only From_ to recognize new messages. * Uses MD5 digest of emails to recognize reclassification of an already classified spam to avoid distortion of the word counts if emails are reclassified. This way emails can be kept in an mbox that is repeatedly scanned by spamprobe without counting them more than once. Digest printed along with score can be stored in emails so that binary attachments can be removed by MUA after scoring without breaking SpamProbe's ability to reclassify the email later. * Provides a time stamp based database cleanup command to remove terms from the database if their counts never rise above a certain threshold value (normally 2). Tends to limit the otherwise unbounded growth of the database as each message adds some unique terms. Also provides a purge command to remove all terms with counts below a specified minimum no matter what their age. * The -X option uses a more aggressive scoring algorithm which uses all significantly good or spammy terms when scoring a message and also gives more weight to within message frequency of terms. This method improves recall and works best when the database contains a few thousand messages. * edit-term command allows users to directly modify the counts of individual terms. For example to force a particular term to be considered spammy or good. * train mode can be used in place of receive to minimize database writes by only updating database for difficult to classify messages. * auto-train mode can be used to build a database efficiently from a collection of email stored in multiple files. * Multiple database options including BerkeleyDB, PBL, and fixed size hash file. INSTALLATION SpamProbe is distributed in source code form. The current version uses autoconf to handle generating an appropriate Makefile for your system. Generally you should be able to install SpamProbe like this: ./configure make make install The configure script accepts some useful command line options including: --prefix=/path/to/install Use this to specify a directory tree to install SpamProbe and its man page into. The default is /usr/local. --with-pbl=/path/to/pbl Use this to specify the directory where you installed PBL (Peter Graf's Program Base Library) if the configure script is not able to find it on its own. See notes below for more information about the relative merits of PBL and Berkeley DB. --with-db=/path/to/db If you would rather use Berkeley DB than PBL use this to specify the directory where you installed Berkeley DB if the configure script is not able to find it on its own. --enable-cdb Use this to enable use of Berkeley DB's CDB mode. In this mode SP will create and use a Berkeley DB "environment" and take advantage of the "concurrent data store" feature of Berkeley DB. Theoretically this allows better interaction with Berkeley DB's utilities (db_verify, db_recover, etc) but some people have reported problems with this mode so it is now optional. --enable-default-8bit Use this if you want to change SP's default handling of eight bit characters. Normally 8 bit characters are converted to the letter z in the database to save space (this can be changed at runtime using the -8 command line option). If you normally receive 8 bit characters in email then you might want to compile with this flag to avoid the need to remember to type -8 all of the time. --enable-assert Use this if you want to enable the assertions in the source code for debugging purposes. Generally this is not desirable for production use since the assertions reduce performance. --enable-big-endian Causes all database reads and writes to use big-endian byte order even on little-endian platforms. Use this if you need to copy a database across different platforms and want to guarantee byte level data portability. This option slows down database I/O on little endian systems. If you want to statically link the BerkeleyDB library run configure with the appropriate command line option in the LDFLAGS variable. For gcc you do could something like this: LDFLAGS=-static ./configure make make install If you want to use Berkeley DB and configure does not find your BerkeleyDB library and you know it is installed but has a non-standard name then you can explicitly define the library to use. For example some RedHat 6.2 systems might require: CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db3 ./configure You need GNU G++ or some other C++ compiler to compile SpamProbe. You also need either PBL or Berkeley DB installed on your system. PBL uses more disk space and may require you to download and install it on your system (see below) but is preferred because it supports transactions and is faster under heavy loads. Berkeley DB comes preinstalled on some operating systems so using it may be easier. It also creates smaller data files than PBL. However some users have reported data corruption issues with Berkeley DB in the past so use of PBL is recommended. That having been said the author of SpamProbe used Berkeley DB for almost a year without any problems in production so the reported issues seem to be OS or system specific. BUILD NOTES USING PBL To obtain PBL download it from Peter Graf's web site: http://mission.base.com/peter/source/ PBL does not use configure for its build process however its makefile seems to be appropriate out of the box for Red Hat Linux systems and may work without changes on other posix-like systems as well. To compile SpamProbe with PBL I did the following: <downloaded pbl_1_03.tar.gz to the current directory> tar xzvf pbl_1_03.tar.gz cd pbl_1_03 make cd .. <downloaded spamprobe-1.0.tar.gz to the current directory> tar xzvf spamprobe-1.0.tar.gz cd spamprobe-1.0 ./configure --with-pbl=../pbl_1_03 make make install BUILD NOTES USING BERKELEY DB To obtain BerkeleyDB if you do not already have it installed (many Linux distributions come with DB preinstalled) visit the SleepCat website to download a copy. BerkeleyDB is open source and you can use it for free. http://www.sleepycat.com Installation instructions for BerkeleyDB can be found here: http://www.sleepycat.com/docs/ref/build_unix/intro.html NOTES USING HASH DATABASE SpamProbe can use a simple, fixed size hash data file as an alternative to PBL or BDB. There are two advantages to the hash format. The first is speed. In my experiments the hash file format is around 2x the speed of PBL (ranged from 1.8x to 3.5x). The second advantage is that the hash data file size is fixed. You choose a size when you create the file and it never changes. File size can be anywhere from 1-100 MB. You need to choose a size large enough to hold your terms with room to spare. More on that later. The hash file format also has significant disadvantages. Becuase the file size is fixed you must monitor the file to ensure that it does not become overly full. When the file becomes more than half full performance will suffer. Also the hash format does not store original terms so you cannot use the dump command to learn what terms are spammy or hammy in your database. Finally, the hash format is imprecise. Hash collisions can cause the counts from different terms to be mixed together which can reduce accuracy. To create a hash data file you add a prefix to the directory name in the -d command line option. You can specify just the directory like this: spamprobe -d hash:$HOME/.spamprobe or you can add a size in megabytes for the file like this: spamprobe -d hash:42:$HOME/.spamprobe The size is only used when a file is first created. SP auto detects the size of an existing hash file. You need to allow enough space for twice as many terms as you are likely to have in your file. In my database I have 2.2 million terms. That required a database of are 53 MB. SP uses 12 bytes per term in the hash file so you can estimate the file size you'll need by multiplying the number of terms by 24. The hash format does not store the original terms. Instead it stores the 32 bit hash code for each term. You can do just about anything with a hash file that you could with a PBL file including import/export, edit-term, cleanup, purge, etc. You can use export your PBL database and import it to build a hash file (note that you cannot go the other direction) and you can export one hash file and import into a new one to enlarge your file. SETUP OF SPAMPROBE FOR USERS Once you have a spamprobe executable copy it to someplace in your PATH so that procmail can find it. Then create a directory for SpamProbe to store its databases in. By default SpamProbe wants to use the directory ~/.spamprobe. You must create this directory manually in order to run SpamProbe or else specify some other directory using the -d option. Something like this should suffice: spamprobe create-db or to use a different directory add the -d command line option: spamprobe -d somedirectory create-db SpamProbe can use either the PBL or Berkeley DB library for its databases. Both are fast on local file systems but very slow over NFS. Please ensure that your spamprobe directory is on a local file system to ensure good performance. MAILDIR FORMAT SpamProbe will accept a maildir directory name anywhere that an Mbox or MBX file name can be specified. When SpamProbe encounters a Maildir mailbox (directory) name it will automatically process all of the non-hidden files in the cur and new subdirectories of the mailbox. There is no need to individually specify these subdirectories. GETTING STARTED SpamProbe is not a stand alone mail filter. It doesn't sort your mail or split it into different mailboxes. Instead it relies on some other program such as procmail to actually file your mail for you. What SpamProbe does do is track the word counts in good and spam emails and generate a score for each email that indicates whether or not it is likely to be spam. Scores range from 0 to 1 with any score of 0.9 or higher indicating a probable spam. Personally I use SpamProbe with procmail to filter my incoming email into mail boxes. I have procmail score each inbound email using SpamProbe and insert a special header into each email containing its score. Then I have procmail move spams into a special mailbox. No spam filter is perfect and SpamProbe sometimes makes mistakes. To correct those mistakes I have a special mailbox that I put undetected spams into. I run SpamProbe periodically and have it reclassify any emails in that mailbox as spam so that it will make a better guess the next time around. This is not a procmail primer. You will need to ensure that you have procmail and formail installed before you can use this technique. Also I recommend that you read the procmail documentation so that you can fully understand this example and adapt it to your own needs. That having been said, my .procmailrc file looks like this: MAILDIR=$HOME/IMAP :0 c saved :0 SCORE=| /home/brian/bin/spamprobe train :0 wf | formail -I "X-SpamProbe: $SCORE" :0 a: *^X-SpamProbe: SPAM spamprobe I use IMAP to fetch my email so my mailboxes all live in a directory named IMAP on my mail server. NOTE: The first stanza copies all incoming emails into a special mbox called saved. SpamProbe IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE and though it works well for me it is possible that it could somehow lose emails. Caution is always a good idea. That having been said, with the procmailrc file as shown above the worst that could happen if SpamProbe crashes is that the email would not be scored properly and procmail would deliver it to your inbox. Of course if procmail crashes all bets are off. The second stanza runs spamprobe in "train" mode to score the email, classify it as either spam or good, and possibly update the database. The train command tries to minimize the number of database updates by only updating the database with terms from an incoming message if there was insufficient confidence in the message's score. The train command always updates the database on the first 1500 of each type received. This ensures that sufficient email is classified to allow the filter to operate reliably. The next stanza runs formail to add a custom header to the email containing the SpamProbe score. The final stanza uses the contents of the custom header to file detected spams into a special mbox named spamprobe. As an alternative to using the train command, you can run spamprobe in "receive" mode. In that mode SpamProbe scores the email and then classifies it as either spam or good based on the score. It always automatically adds the word counts for the email to the appropriate database. This is essentially like running in score mode followed immediately by either spam or good mode. It produces more database I/O and a bigger database but ensures that every message has its terms reflected in the database. Personally I use train mode. A sample procmailrc file using the receive command looks like this: MAILDIR=$HOME/IMAP :0 c saved :0 SCORE=| /home/brian/bin/spamprobe receive :0 wf | formail -I "X-SpamProbe: $SCORE" :0 a: *^X-SpamProbe: SPAM spamprobe If you need to have a locale set when spamprobe is run by procmail you may need to use a script inside of the procmailrc file rather than running spamprobe directly. The script can set up any command line options or environment variables before running spamprobe. The most common use of this technique is to set the LANG environment variable. MAKING CORRECTIONS SpamProbe is not perfect. It is able to detect over 99% of the spams that I receive but some still slip through. To correct these missed emails I run SpamProbe periodically and have it scan a special mbox. Since I use IMAP to retrieve my emails I can simply drop undetected spams into this mbox from my mail client. If you use POP or some other system then you will need to find a way get the undetected spams into a mbox that spamprobe can see. Periodically I run a script that scans three special mboxes to correct errors in judgment: #!/bin/sh IMAPDIR=$HOME/IMAP spamprobe remove $IMAPDIR/remove spamprobe good $IMAPDIR/nonspam spamprobe spam $IMAPDIR/spam spamprobe train-spam $IMAPDIR/spamprobe From this example you can see that I use three special mboxes to make corrections. I copy emails that I don't want spamprobe to store into the remove mbox. This is useful if you receive email from a friend or colleague that looks like spam and you don't want it to dilute the effectiveness of the terms it contains. Undetected spams go into the spam mbox. SpamProbe will reclassify those emails as spam and correct its database accordingly. Note that doing this does not guarantee that the spam will always be scored as spam in the future. Some spams are too bland to detect perfectly. Fortunately those are very rare. The nonspam mbox is for any false positives. These are always possible and it is important to have a way to reclassify them when they do occur. If you are using receive mode rather than train mode then the above script can be modified to remove the train-spam line. For example: #!/bin/sh IMAPDIR=$HOME/IMAP spamprobe remove $IMAPDIR/remove spamprobe good $IMAPDIR/nonspam spamprobe spam $IMAPDIR/spam Finally you'll need to build a starting database. Since SpamProbe relies on word counts from past emails it requires a decent sized database to be accurate. To build the database select some of your mboxes containing past emails. Ideally you should have one mbox of spams and one or more of non-spams. If you don't have any spams handy then don't worry, SpamProbe will gradually become more accurate as you receive more spams. Expect a fairly high false negative (i.e. missed spams) rate as you first start using SpamProbe. To import your starting messages use commands such as these. The example assumes that you have non-spams stored in a file named mbox in your home directory and some spams stored in a file named nasty-spams. Replace these names with real ones. spamprobe good ~/mbox spamprobe spam ~/nasty-spams COMMAND LINE USAGE SpamProbe accepts a small set of commands and a growing set of options on the command line in addition to zero or more file names of mboxes. The general usage is: spamprobe [options] <command> [filename...] You can obtain a full list of all available command line options by running the "help" command. For example: spamprobe help The recognized options are: -a char By default SpamProbe converts non-ascii characters (characters with the most significant bit set to 1) into the letter 'z'. This is useful for lumping all Asian characters into a single word for easy recognition. The -a option allows you to change the character to something else if you don't like the letter 'z' for some reason. -c Tells spamprobe to create the database directory if it does not already exist. Normally spamprobe exits with a usage error if the database directory does not already exist. -C number Tells SpamProbe to assign a default, somewhat neutral, probability to any term that does not have a weighted (good count doubled) count of at least number in the database. This prevents terms which have been seen only a few times from having an unreasonable influence on the score of an email containing them. The default value is 5. For example if number is 5 then in order for a term to use its calculated probability it must have been seen 3 times in good mails, or 2 times in good mails and once in spam, or 5 times in spam, or some other combination adding up to at least 5. -d directory By default SpamProbe stores its database in a directory named .spamprobe under your home directory. The -d option allows you to specify a different directory to use. This is necessary if your home directory is NFS mounted for example. The directory name can be prefixed with a special code to force SpamProbe to use a particular type of data file format. The type codes depend on how your copy of SpamProbe was compiled. Defined types include: Example Description -d pbl:path Forces the use of PBL data file. -d hash:path Forces the use of an mmapped hash file. -d split:path Forces the use of a hash file and ISAM file (may provide better precision than plain hash in some cases). The hash: option can also specify a desired file size in megabytes before the path. For example -d hash:19:path would cause SpamProbe to use a 19 MB hash file. The size must be in the range of 1-100. The default hash file size is 16 MB. Because hash files have a fixed size and capacity they should be cleaned relatively often using the cleanup command (see below) to prevent them from becoming full or being slowed by too many hash key collisions. Hash files provide better performance than either of the ISAM options (PBL or Berkeley DB). However hash files do not store the original terms. Only a 32 bit hash key is stored with each term. This prevents a user from exploring the terms in the database using the dump command to see what words are particularly spammy or hammy. -D directory Tells SpamProbe to use the database in the specified directory (must be different than the one specified with the -d option) as a shared database from which to draw terms that are not defined in the user's own database. This can be used to provide a baseline database shared by all users on a system (in the -D directory) and a private database unique to each user of the system ($HOME/.spamprobe or -d directory). -g field_name Tells SpamProbe what header to look for previous score and message digest in. Default is X-SpamProbe. Field name is not case sensitive. Used by all commands except receive. -h By default SpamProbe removes HTML markup from the text in emails to help avoid false positives. The -h option allows you to override this behavior and force SpamProbe to include words from within HTML tags in its word counts. Note that SpamProbe always counts any URLs in hrefs within tags whether -h is used or not. Use of this option is discouraged. It can increase the rate of spam detection slightly but unless the user receives a significant amount of HTML emails it also tends to increase the number of false positives. -H option By default SpamProbe only scans a meaningful subset of headers from the email message when searching for words to score. The -H option allows the user to specify additional headers to scan. Legal values are "all", "nox", "none", or "normal". "all" scans all headers, "nox" scans all headers except those starting with X-, "none" does not scan headers, and "normal" scans the normal set of headers. In addition to those values you can also explicitly add a header to the list of headers to process by adding the header name in lower case preceded by a plus sign. Multiple headers can be specified by using multiple -H options. For example, to include only the From and Received headers in your train command you could run spamprobe as follows: spamprobe -Hnone -H+from -H+received train You can also selectively ignore headers that would otherwise be processed by using -H-headername. For example to process all headers except for Subject you could run spamprobe as follows: spamprobe -Hall -H-subject train To process the normal set of headers but also add the SpamAssassin header X-SpamStatus you could run spamprobe as follows: spamprobe -H+x-spam-status train -l number Changes the spam probability threshold for emails from the default (0.7) to number. The number must be a between 0 and 1. Generally the value should be above 0.5 to avoid a high false positive rate. Lower numbers tend to produce more false positives while higher numbers tend to reduce accuracy. -m Forces SpamProbe to use mbox format for reading emails in receive mode. Normally SpamProbe assumes that the input to receive mode contains a single message so it doesn't look for message breaks. -M Forces SpamProbe to treat the entire input as a single message. This ignores From lines and Content-Length headers in the input. -o option_name Enables special options by name. Currently the only special options are: -o graham Causes SpamProbe to emulate the filtering algorithm originally outlined in A Plan For Spam. -o honor-status-header Causes SpamProbe to ignore messages if they have a Status: header containing a capital D. Some mail servers use this status to indicate a message that has been flagged for deletion but has not yet been purged from the file. DO NOT use this option with the receive or train command in your procmailrc file! Doing so could allow spammers to bypass the filter. This option is meant to be used with the train-spam and train-good commands in scripts that periodically update the database. -o honor-xstatus-header Causes SpamProbe to ignore messages if they have a X-Status: header containing a capital D. Some mail servers use this status to indicate a message that has been flagged for deletion but has not yet been purged from the file. DO NOT use this option with the receive or train command in your procmailrc file! Doing so could allow spammers to bypass the filter. This option is meant to be used with the train-spam and train-good commands in scripts that periodically update the database. -o ignore-body Causes SpamProbe to ignore terms from the message body when computing a score. This is not normally recommended but might be useful in conjunction with some other filter. For example, the whitelist option (see below) implicitly ignores the message body. -o orig-score Causes SpamProbe to use its original scoring algorithm that produces excellent results but tends to generate scores of either 0 or 1 for all messages. -o suspicious-tags Causes SpamProbe to scan the contents of "suspicious" tags for tokens rather than simply throwing them out. Currently only font tags are scanned but other tags may be added to this list in later versions. -o tokenized Causes SpamProbe to read tokens one per line rather than processing the input as mbox format. This allows users to completely replace the standard spamprobe tokenizer if they wish and instead use some external program as a tokenizer. For example in your procmailrc file you could use: SCORE=| tokenize.pl | /bin/spamprobe -o tokenized train In this mode SpamProbe considers a blank line to indicate the end of one message's tokens and the start of a new message's tokens. SpamProbe computes a message digest based on the lines of text containing the tokens. -o whitelist Causes SpamProbe to use information from the email's headers to identify whether or not the email is from a legitimate correspondent. The message body is ignored as are any never before seen terms and phrases in the headers. This option can be used with the score command in a procmailrc file to use a bayesian white list in conjunction with some other filter or rule external to SpamProbe. The -o option can be used multiple times and all requested options will be applied. Note that some options might conflict with each other in which case the last option would take precedence. -p number Changes the maximum number of words per phrase. Default value is two. Increasing the limit improves accuracy somewhat but increases database size. Experiments indicate that increasing beyond two is not worth the extra cost in space. -P number Causes spamprobe to perform a purge of all terms with junk count less than or equal 2 after every number messages are processed. Using this option when classifying a large collection of spam can prevent the database from growing overly large at the cost of more processing time and possible loss of precision. -r number Changes the number of times that a single word/phrase can occur in the top words array used to calculate the score for each message. Allowing repeats reduces the number of words overall (since a single word occupies more than one slot) but allows words which occur frequently in the message to have a higher weight. Generally this is changed only for optimization purposes. -R Causes spamprobe to treat the input as a single message and to base its exit code on whether or not that message was spam. The exit code will be 0 if the message was spam or 1 if the message was good. -s number SpamProbe maintains an in memory cache of the words it has seen in previous messages to reduce disk I/O and improve performance. By default the cache will contain the most recently accessed 2,500 terms. This number can be changed using the -s option. Using a larger the cache size will cause SpamProbe to use more memory and, potentially, to perform less database I/O. A value of zero causes SpamProbe to use 100,000 as the limit which effectively means that the cache will only be flushed at program exit (unless you have really enormous mailbox files). The cache doesn't affect receive, dump, or export but has a significant impact on the others. -T Causes SpamProbe to write out the top terms associated with each message in addition to its normal output. Works with find-good, find-spam, and score. -v When it appears once on the command line this option tells SpamProbe to write verbose information during processing. When it appears twice on the command line this option tells SpamProbe to write debugging information to stderr. This can be useful for debugging or for seeing which terms SpamProbe used to score each email. -V Prints version and copyright information and then exits. -w number Changes the number of most significant words/phrases used by SpamProbe to calculate the score for each message. Generally this is changed only for optimization purposes. -x Normally SpamProbe uses only a fixed number of top terms (as set by the -w command line option) when scoring emails. The -x option can be used to allow the array to be extended past the max size if more terms are available with probabilities <= 0.1 or >= 0.9. -X An interesting variation on the scoring settings. Equivalent to using "-w5 -r5 -x" so that generally only words with probabilites <= 0.1 or >= 0.9 are used and word frequencies in the email count heavily towards the score. Tests have shown that this setting tends to be safer (fewer false positives) and have higher recall (proper classification of spams previously scored as spam) although its predictive power isn't quite as good as the default settings. WARNING: This setting might work best with a fairly large corpus, it has not been tested with a small corpus so it might be very inaccurate with fewer than 1000 total messages. -Y Assume traditional Berkeley mailbox format, ignoring any Content-Length: fields. -7 Tells SpamProbe to ignore any characters with the most significant bit set to 1 instead of mapping them to the letter 'z'. -8 Tells SpamProbe to store all characters even if their most significant bit is set to 1. SpamProbe recognizes the following commands: spamprobe help [command] With no arguments spamprobe lists all of the valid commands. If one or more commands are specified after the word help, spamprobe will print a more verbose description of each command. spamprobe create-db If no database currently exists spamprobe will attempt to create one and then exit. This can be used to bootstrap a new installation. Strictly speaking this command is not necessary since the train-spam, train-good, and auto-train commands will also create a database if none already exists but some users like to create a database as a separate installation step. spamprobe create-config Writes a new configuration file named spamprobe.hdl into the database directory (normally $HOME/.spamprobe). Any existing configuration file will be overwritten so be sure to make a copy before invoking this command. spamprobe receive [filename...] Tells SpamProbe to read its standard input (or a file specified after the receive command) and score it using the current databases. Once the message has been scored the message is classified as either spam or non-spam and its word counts are written to the appropriate database. The message's score is written to stdout along with a single word. For example: SPAM 0.9999999 595f0150587edd7b395691964069d7af or GOOD 0.0200000 595f0150587edd7b395691964069d7af The string of numbers and letters after the score is the message's "digest", a 32 character number which uniquely identifies the message. The digest is used by SpamProbe to recognize messages that it has processed previously so that it can keep its word counts consistent if the message is reclassified. Using the -T option additionally lists the terms used to produce the score along with their counts (number of times they were found in the message). spamprobe train [filename...] Functionally identical to receive except that the database is only modified if the message was "difficult" to classify. In practice this can reduce the number of database updates to as little as 10% of messages received. spamprobe score [filename...] Similar to receive except that the database is not modified in any way. spamprobe summarize [filename...] Similar to score except that it prints a short summary and score for each message. This can be useful when testing. Using the -T option additionally lists the terms used to produce the score along with their counts (number of times they were found in the message). spamprobe find-spam [filename...] Similar to score except that it prints a short summary and score for each message that is determined to be spam. This can be useful when testing. Using the -T option additionally lists the terms used to produce the score along with their counts (number of times they were found in the message). spamprobe find-good [filename...] Similar to score except that it prints a short summary and score for each message that is determined to be good. This can be useful when testing. Using the -T option additionally lists the terms used to produce the score along with their counts (number of times they were found in the message). spamprobe auto-train {SPAM|GOOD filename...}... Attempts to efficiently build a database from all of the named files. You may specify one or more file of each type. Prior to each set of file names you must include the word SPAM or GOOD to indicate what type of mail is contained in the files which follow on the command line. The case of the SPAM and GOOD keywords is important. Any number of file names can be specified between the keywords. The command line format is very flexible. You can even use a find command in backticks to process whole directory trees of files. For example: spamprobe auto-train SPAM spams/* GOOD `find hams -type f` SpamProbe pre-scans the files to determine how many emails of each type exist and then trains on hams and spams in a random sequence that balances the inflow of each type so that the train command can work most effectively. For example if you had 400 hams and 400 spams, auto-train will generally process one spam, then one ham, etc. If you had 4000 spams and 400 hams then auto-train will generally process 10 spams, then one ham, etc. Since this command will likely take a long time to run it is often desireable to use it with the -v option to see progress information as the messages are processed. spamprobe -v auto-train SPAM spams/* GOOD hams/* spamprobe good [filename...] Scans each file (or stdin if no file is specified) and reclassifies every email in the file as non-spam. The databases are updated appropriately. Messages previously classified as good (recognized using their MD5 digest or message ids) are ignored. Messages previously classified as spam are reclassified as good. spamprobe train-good [filename...] Functionally identical to "good" command except that it only updates the database for messages that are either incorrectly classified (i.e. classified as spam) or are "difficult" to classify. In practice this can reduce amount of database updates to as little as 10% of messages. spamprobe spam [filename...] Scans each file (or stdin if no file is specified) and reclassifies every email in the file as spam. The databases are updated appropriately. Messages previously classified as spam (recognized using their MD5 digest of message ids) are ignored. Messages previously classified as good are reclassified as spam. spamprobe train-spam [filename...] Functionally identical to "spam" command except that it only updates the database for messages that are either incorrectly classified (i.e. classified as good) or are "difficult" to classify. In practice this can reduce amount of database updates to as little as 10% of messages. spamprobe remove [filename...] Scans each file (or stdin if no file is specified) and removes its term counts from the database. Messages which are not in the database (recognized using their MD5 digest) are ignored. spamprobe cleanup [ junk_count [ max_age ] ] Scans the database and removes all terms with junk_count or less (default 2) which have not had their counts modified in at least max_age days (default 7). You can specify multiple count/age pairs on a single command line but must specify both a count and an age for all but the last count. This should be run periodically to keep the database from growing endlessly. For my own email I use cron to run the cleanup command every day and delete all terms with count of 2 or less that have not been modified in the last two weeks. Here is the excerpt from my crontab: 3 0 * * * /home/brian/bin/spamprobe cleanup 2 14 Alternatively you might want to use a much higher count (1000 in this example) for terms that have not been seen in roughly six months: 3 0 * * * /home/brian/bin/spamprobe cleanup 1000 180 2 14 Because of the way that PBL and BerkeleyDB work the database file will not actually shrink, but newly added terms will be able to use the space previously occupied by any removed terms so that the file's growth should be significantly slower if this command is used. To actually shrink the database you can build a new one using the BerkeleyDB utility programs db_dump and db_load (Berkeley DB only) or the spamprobe import and export commands (either database library). For example: cd ~ mkdir new.spamprobe spamprobe export | spamprobe -d new.spamprobe import mv .spamprobe old.spamprobe mv new.spamprobe .spamprobe The -P option can also be used to limit the rate of growth of the database when importing a large number of emails. For example if you want to classify 1000 emails and want SP to purge rare terms every 100 messages use a command such as: spamprobe -P 100 good goodmailboxname Using -P slows down the classification but can avoid the need to use the db_dump trick. Using -P only makes sense when classifying a large number of messages. spamprobe purge [ junk_count ] Similar to cleanup but forces the immediate deletion of all terms with total count less than junk_count (default is 2) no matter how long it has been since they were modified (i.e. even if they were just added today). This could be handy immediately after classifying a large mailbox of historical spam or good email to make room for the next batch. spamprobe purge-terms regex Similar to purge except that it removes from the database all terms which match the specified regular expression. Be careful with this command because it could remove many more terms than you expect. Use dump with the same regex before running this command to see exactly what will be deleted. spamprobe edit-term term good_count spam_count Can be used to specifically set the good and spam counts of a term. Whether this is truly useful is doubtful but it is provided for completeness sake. For example it could be used to force a particular word to be very spammy or very good: spamprobe edit-term nigeria 0 1000000 spamprobe edit-term burton 10000000 0 spamprobe dump [ regex ] Prints the contents of the word counts database one word per line in human readable format with spam probability, good count, spam count, flags, and word in columns separated by whitespace. PBL and Berkeley DB sort terms alphabetically. The standard unix sort command can be used to sort the terms as desired. For example to list all words from "most good" to "least good" use this command: spamprobe dump | sort -k 1nr -k 3nr To list all words from "most spammy" to "least spammy" use this command: spamprobe dump | sort -k 1n -k 2nr Optionally you can specify a regular expression. If specified SpamProbe will only dump terms matching the regular expression. For example: spamprobe dump 'finance' spamprobe dump '\bfinance\b' spamprobe dump 'HSubject_.*finance' spamprobe tokenize [ filename ] Prints the tokens found in the file one word per line in human readable format with spam probability, good count, spam count, message count, and word in columns separated by whitespace. Terms are listed in the order in which they were encountered in the message. The standard unix sort command can be used to sort the terms as desired. For example to list all words from "most good" to "least good" use this command: spamprobe tokenize filename | sort -k 1nr -k 3nr To list all words from "most spammy" to "least spammy" use this command: spamprobe tokenize filename | sort -k 1n -k 2nr spamprobe export Similar to the dump command but prints the counts and words in a comma separated format with the words surrounded by double quotes. This can be more useful for importing into some databases. spamprobe import Reads the specified files which must contain export data written by the export command. The terms and counts from this file are added to the database. This can be used to convert a database from a prior version. spamprobe exec command Obtains an exclusive lock on the database and then executes the command using system(3). If multiple arguments are given after "exec" they are combined to form the command to be executed. This command can be used when you want to perform some operation on the database without interference from incoming mail. For example, to back up your .spamprobe directory using tar you could do something like this: cd spamprobe exec tar cf spamprobe-data.tar.gz .spamprobe If you simply want to hold the lock while interactively running commands in a different xterm you could use "spamprobe exec read". The linux read program simply reads a line of text from your terminal so the lock would effectively be held until you pressed the enter key. Another option would be to use a shell as the command and type the commands into that shell: spamprobe /bin/bash ls date exit Be careful not to run spamprobe in the shell though since the spamprobe in the shell will wind up deadlocked waiting for the spamprobe running the exec command to release its lock. spamprobe exec-shared command Same as exec except that a shared lock is used. This may be more appropriate if you are backing up your database since operations like score (but not train or receive) could still be performed on the database while the backup was running. SUPPORT AND WARRANTY SpamProbe works well for me. However please keep in mind that there is NO WARRANTY at all with this software. Read the QPL (LICENSE.txt) for details. YOU ASSUME ALL RISK when using this software. Be sure to visit the project page on sourceforge. There you can submit bug reports or feature requests, read and post messages on the forums, and download the latest version. http://sourceforge.net/projects/spamprobe/ You can also join the spamprobe mailing list to discuss issues with other SpamProbe users. http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamprobe-users Also feel free to contact me at bburton@users.sourceforge.net with any suggestions for improvements that you don't want to post to the forums. Enjoy! Brian Burton