Re: sa-learn ham and auto_whitelist

[Matt Kettler <mk...@evi-inc.com>]

FH wrote:
> I have a script that goes through and looks for ham mailboxes every 6
> hours[1], I also recently added the below to my local.cf file:
> 
> use_auto_whitelist 1
> auto_whitelist_path /etc/mail/spamassassin/auto-whitelist
> 
> and primed the auto-whitelist w/ 
> 
> spamassassin --add-addr-to-whitelist=<problem email> [according to the ORA
> book]
>

The ORA book apparently was mistaken. IMHO, this should *only* ever be used to
correct accidental contamination of the AWL database.

It should never be used as a mechanism to try to whitelist a sender, as it's
affects decay as additional messages are received and you'll have to keep
re-running it to achieve the same results.

> and restarted spamd.  This was about a week ago but the user is still
> reporting the emails from this address are consistantly coming through marked
> as spam.
> 
> Some more relavent info:
> - I'm running SA 3.0.2 w/ Postfix and for the most part it seems to be working
> ok.  Since I've added the scripts that look for ham/spam automatically every 6
> hours the hit rate has significantly improved.
> 
> - The emails that are marked as spam are in a foreign language (Korean in case
> that's significant somehow), however there are other emails in that language
> that come through ok.
> 
> - I know I could add a "whitelist_from" to local.cf but I was hoping for a
> more ellegant solution ;)

That is an infinitely more elegant than using spamassassin
--add-addr-to-whitelist. Better would be to use whitelist_from_rcvd


> 
> - I don't allow user defined rules.
> 
> 
> Questions:
> - Does everything I did look right?  Are there other tricks/tips that I
> missed?

Really, you shouldn't be looking at the scores. You should be looking at what
rules the messages are hitting. Only this can tell you the "why" of the matter.
Everything else is just looking at the results.