The deluge opens

Somehow in the move of the websites and files from Linode back to Thornhill (home server on the other end of DSL; 1.5GHz Sempron and 1GB of RAM in a nice Shuttle box), I copied ~/.spamassassin to the wrong directory...and wow, did this ever make a difference to spam filtering. My mailbox was flooded with stuff coming in to an old (12 years!) address that I pretty much just use for WHOIS contacts these days.

I didn't realize what was going on at first, so I tried training it on my saved spam and ham. 90k messages later, it still didn't do it properly. I did some digging, then figured out what had happened and copied the files to the right place. Boom — the sweet, sweet sound of a nearly-empty inbox.

The user_prefs files were the same each time, so it was just the Bayes token files that were different. The only thing I can think of is that the working files were the result of training SA on its mistakes, rather than on its successes.

Of course, I should probably just get the address cancelled or changed…the last time I looked, well over 95% of the spam I've got came to that address. But still, I'm starting to think that I should be keeping the Bayes files under revision control...