Stopping Processing if in 'whitelist_from'

[Ken Schweigert <sh...@gmail.com>]

I'm running SA 3.0.2 as a daemon on my local workstation to filter
messages before my Inbox delivered via procmail and spamc.

Over a weekend I can easily have 1,000 messages on my POP server. 
Monday mornings can take over 2 hours to pull and process messages. 
SA does a great job at tagging the spam, I think mainly because of DCC
and network checks, so I would like to not change that part of the
setup.  The majority of the messages I receive are status reports from
various servers and come from a few email addresses.  I've added them
in my user_prefs file as 'whitelist_from root@myserver.tld' so they
get scored down and never tagged.  What I would like to have happen is
have SA stop any further checks if it matches the whitelist_from field
and just pass it through.

Is this possible?

-ken
-- 
If you can read this ... thank a system administrator.

Re: Stopping Processing if in 'whitelist_from'

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

Ken Schweigert wrote:
> I'm running SA 3.0.2 as a daemon on my local workstation to filter
> messages before my Inbox delivered via procmail and spamc.
> 
<snip>
> What I would like to have happen is
> have SA stop any further checks if it matches the whitelist_from field
> and just pass it through.
> 
> Is this possible?

No. The speed gains from doing this would be pretty small anyway. By the time SA
recognizes that the message is whitelisted, it's already sent out most network
checks (in the normal case it makes sense to do these as early as possible, so
that you're doing the rest of the work while you wait for answers).

However, you can write a simple procmail rule to avoid calling spamc for these
messages. This has a lot of extra benefits (no possible bayes autolearning) and
gets you the most performance gain possible (you even save the overhead of
calling spamc!).

In general don't rely on SA's built-in whitelists. They're there, and are
useful, but you're better off whitelisting at a higher layer by not calling SA
in the first place. The built-in whitelists are really there for people who
can't avoid calling SA. (ie: very simple milters)