bionic (5) spamoracle.conf.5.gz

Provided by: spamoracle_1.4-15_amd64 bug

NAME

       spamoracle.conf - SpamOracle configuration file format

DESCRIPTION

       The  spamoracle.conf  file  is  a  configuration file governing the operation of the spamoracle(1) e-mail
       classification tool.  By default, the configuration file is searched  in  $HOME/.spamoracle.conf  but  an
       alternate location can be specified using the -config flag to spamoracle(1).

       Important  note:  most of the configuration parameters should not be modified lightly, as this may result
       in completely wrong e-mail classification.  Familiarity with Graham's filtering algorithm,  as  described
       in  the  paper  referenced  at  the  end of this page, is required to really understand the effect of the
       parameters.

SYNTAX

       The spamoracle.conf file is composed of lines of the form variable = value.  Lines starting with  a  hash
       sign (#) are treated as comments and ignored.  Blank lines are ignored.

       Depending  on  the  type  of  the  variable  (see  the list of variables below), the value part is of the
       following forms:

       string A sequence of characters.  Blanks (spaces, tabs) at the beginning and the end of  the  string  are
              ignored.  Alternatively, the string can be enclosed in double quotes ("), in which case spaces are
              not trimmed.  Inside quoted strings, blackslashes ( and double quotes (") must be escaped  with  a
              backslash, as in \ or

       boolean
              Either  on,  yes, true, or 1 to activate the boolean option, or off, no, false, or 0 to deactivate
              it.

       integer
              A decimal integer

       float  A decimal floating-point number.

       regexp A regular expression in emacs(1) syntax.  The repetition operators are *, +, and  ?.   Alternation
              is  written  \|  and  grouping is written \(...\).  Character classes are written between brackets
              [...]  as usual.  A single dot denotes any character  except  newline.   Regular  expressions  are
              case-insensitive.

CONFIGURABLE PARAMETERS

       database_file
              (type string, default value $HOME/.spamoracle.db )
              The location of the file that contains the database of word frequencies used by spamoracle(1).

       html_retain_tags
              (type boolean, default value false)
              In  HTML-formatted  e-mails  and  attachments,  the names of HTML tags are normally not treated as
              words and are ignored for the word frequency calculations. If the  html_retain_tags  parameter  is
              set  to true, HTML tags (such as img or bold) are treated as words and included in the computation
              of word frequencies.

       html_tag_attributes
              (type regexp, default value
              a/href\|img/src\|img/alt\|frame/src\|font/face\|font/color)
              This regular expression matches pairs of HTML tags and HTML attributes written  as  tag/attribute.
              When  scanning  HTML-formatted  e-mails  and  attachments,  attributes  to  HTML tags are normally
              ignored, unless the tag/attribute pair matches the regular expression html_tag_attributes.  If the
              tag/attribute  pair matches this regexp, the value of the attribute (for instance, the URL for the
              a/href attribute) is scanned for words.

       mail_headers
              (type regexp, default value from:\|subject:)
              A regular expression determining which headers of an e-mail message are scanned for words.

       spam_header
              (type string, default value X-Spam)
              The name of the header that spamoracle mark adds to incoming e-mail messages, with the results  of
              the spam/non-spam classification.

       attachments_header
              (type string, default value X-Attachments)
              The  name  of  the header that spamoracle mark adds to incoming e-mail messages, with the one-line
              summary of attachment types, names and character sets.  The  generation  of  this  header  can  be
              turned off with the summarize_attachment parameter.

       summarize_attachment
              (type boolean, default value true)
              If  this  parameter is set, spamoracle mark generates a one-line summary of the attachments of the
              incoming messages, and inserts this summary in the message headers.   Setting  this  parameter  to
              false disables the generation of this extra header.

       num_meaningful_words
              (type integer, default value 15)
              Maximal number of "meaningful" words that are retained for computing the spam probability.  During
              mail analysis, spamoracle extracts all  words  of  the  message,  and  retains  those  whose  spam
              frequency  (frequency  of  occurrence  in  spam  messages)  is  closest  to  1  or  to 0.  At most
              num_meaningful_words such "meaningful" words are retained.

       max_repetitions
              (type integer, default value 2)
              Maximum number of times a given word can occur in the  set  of  "meaningful"  words  retained  for
              computing  the  spam  probability.  The default value of 2 means that at most 2 occurrences of the
              same word will be retained.

       low_freq_limit
              (type float, default value 0.01)

       high_freq_limit
              (type float, default value 0.99)
              The spam frequency of a word is computed as the number of occurrences in spam divided by number of
              occurrences  in  all  messages.   This  ratio  is  then  clipped to the interval [ low_freq_limit,
              high_freq_limit ], so that words that are extremely rare or extremely common in spam do  not  bias
              the  probability  computation  too  much.   The default values of 0.01 and 0.99 are adequate for a
              corpus of a few thousand e-mails.  For larger corpora (e.g. 10000 e-mails), the values  0.001  and
              0.999 may give better results.

       min_meaningful_words
              (type integer, default value 5)
              Minimum  number  of  "meaningful" words below which spamoracle mark refuses to classify the e-mail
              and outputs "unknown" status.  This happens with very  short  e-mails,  or  e-mails  that  consist
              exclusively of links and pictures.

       good_mail_prob
              (type float, default value 0.2)
              Spam probability below which the e-mail is classified as non-spam.

       spam_mail_prob
              (type float, default value 0.8)
              Spam  probability  above which the e-mail is classified as spam.  Messages whose probability falls
              between good_mail_prob and spam_mail_prob are classified as "unknown".

AUTHOR

       Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>

SEE ALSO

       spamoracle(1)

       http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html (Paul Graham's seminal paper)

                                                                                              SPAMORACLE.CONF(5)