[conspire] SpamAssassin and BAYES_99

[Don Marti]

Question on mail server configuration (yes, this should be going through 
the new server, so please let me know if any of the headers look wrong)

I found this LWN article on Bayesian filtering...

https://lwn.net/Articles/173910/

Interesting point:

"SpamAssassin, out of the box, assigns 3.5 points to BAYES_99. Since 
five points are required, by default, to condemn a message, the bayesian 
filter can never do that on its own. Any message, to be considered spam, 
must trigger some tests outside of the bayesian filter....The "default" 
results, above, came about because your editor got a little over-zealous 
when clearing out the bayesian and whitelist databases for a new round 
of tests; so they use the default scoring for BAYES_99. The "tweaked" 
results, instead, have the score for that rule raised to 5.0 points, 
allowing the bayesian filter to condemn mail on its own. The difference 
in the results can be clearly seen from the table: spam filtering 
performance is vastly improved, with no false positives."

I can sort of see why SpamAssassin would ship with a cautious score for 
this -- you don't know how well the users are going to train the 
filter.  I don't have a problem with training, so I'm thinking I should 
increase the score for BAYES_99 to at least 4.5, which would make the 
difference on a bunch of my current false negatives that made it to the 
inbox.

Any other free-range mail server postmasters have data on this?