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Aldous Leung wrote:
> Is there any way I can import B/W list for a user
instead of entering email addresses one by one?
Not at this time, though it's on the feature request list
for the
maiadbtool.pl script.
That said, think long and hard about whether you really
/want/ to do
this. Whitelisting your entire address book may be a
convenient way to
eliminate the possibility of false positives from the people
you
communicate with, but it also has two rather nasty
side-effects that you
probably don't intend:
(1) It gives spammers a convenient way to bypass your spam
filter, by
simply forging the sender address, pretending to be one of
the people in
your address book. Modern spamware is intelligent enough to
collate
harvested addresses by domain, so that if the spammer's list
contains
several different addresses in the example.com domain, it
will choose
those addresses by preference when forging sender addresses
for spam
aimed at the example.com domain. e.g. if the spammer's list
includes
"larry example.com", "moeexample.com", and
"curlyexample.com", then
his spamware will choose "moeexample.com" as the
sender address to
forge when sending spam to "curlyexample.com", due to
the high
probability that employees at the same organization will
have each other
whitelisted.
(2) Since whitelisted items are never spam-checked, they do
not
contribute to the Bayes-training process, so your Bayes
database is
deprived of the opportunity to learn from all of these good
examples of
non-spam. Whitelisting a few senders is no big deal, but
when you do
this for /all/ of your sources of non-spam, you leave your
Bayes
database with nothing but spam to learn from. This ends up
reducing the
effectiveness of your Bayes engine, because SpamAssassin
can't
differentiate spam from non-spam if it doesn't know what
non-spam looks
like.
In short, whitelisting should be reserved for exceptional
cases--situations where a sender's mail regularly ends up
misclassified
as spam (perhaps because he sends you crude jokes, or
because it's a
newsletter with racy content or stock market info that would
otherwise
trigger a dozen SpamAssassin rules, etc.).
- --
Robert LeBlanc <rjlrenaissoft.com>
Renaissoft, Inc.
Maia Mailguard <http://www.maiamail
guard.com/>
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