Re: spam-stat regeneration notes

[pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard)]

[Bill White]

> I've been using spam-stat for about 6 months now, and noticed lately
> that spam processing was getting mightly slow

My observation as well.  Things which are ever growing are becoming slow
after some amount of time, progressively, insiduously, yet sometimes sooner
than one expects.  But then, the thing might have gotten fairly big, and
rather quite difficult to clean up or reconstruct properly.  At least, this
summarises _years_ of experience with BBDB. :-)

> - Has anyone else needed to regenerate a Bayesian hash system?

I kludged other methods so it is easy for me to do, and I did it once or
twice in the last few months.  One thing is that you acquire experience over
time at properly sorting ham and spam (especially in some border cases), and
your training databases also get more dependable if you "expire" them
somehow.  As a consequence, regenerating your Bayesian system makes it much
better.  It does not take many wrongly filed messages in the training
databases for significantly weakening the capabilities of Bayesian system.

> - Is there an easy way to run a function over an entire directory
>   tree, while specifying which dirs to include or avoid?

GNU `find' maybe? :-)

In my own case, it did not take long to build the tool I needed, which is
pretty aware of all my little habits...  You might tackle this as well?

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard