Ubuntu Manpage: spamoracle.conf - SpamOracle configuration file format

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>

NAME

DESCRIPTION

SYNTAX

CONFIGURABLE PARAMETERS

AUTHOR

SEE ALSO