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Kurt Buff wrote:
> Further questions regarding this subject, if you
please:
>
> 1) I've been perusing the docs, and tickets, and it
seems that a facility to
> bulk whitelist for inbound mails isn't available. See
specifically ticket
> #91. Reason for query is that we'd like to export SMTP
addresses from our
> CRM/ERP applications, and whitelist our customers.
As you point out, there's an open ticket for this feature
request, so
it's something that will eventually be added to
maiadbtool.pl. That
said, if you've checked the archives of this list you'll
find that bulk
whitelisting is not a very good idea for a number of
reasons, and we
discourage it (which is why ticket #91 has yet to be
implemented).
Apart from depriving your Bayes database of a chance to
learn from
whitelisted/blacklisted items, the problem of address
forgery makes
whitelisting a dangerous practice.
It's also worth noting that there are some items you don't
want your
Bayes database to learn from, because they're exceptions to
the
democratically-established norms of your database;
whitelisting such
oddball items prevents your Bayes database from becoming
confused with
tokens from, e.g. a porn newsletter that one of your users
/does/ want
to receive. As such, we strongly discourage the practice of
just
whitelisting your entire address book (or your customer
list, in your
case). Whitelists exist to handle exceptions--the cases
that are so far
afield from what the majority of your users consider
spam/non-spam that
they would regularly end up in the spam quarantine.
> I know I can do this with
> a .cf file for SpamAssassin - would it make more sense
to do that, in this
> circumstance? After reading comments on the
non-availability to MM of
> whitelisted/blacklisted mails for training, it would
seem better to use the
> SpamAssassin facility for this.
Yes, you can do this, but at the cost of considerable
resources.
Obviously if you use SpamAssassin's whitelists the mail
needs to be
scanned by SpamAssassin, including all of its rules (a
whitelisted item
earns a -100 score bonus intended to offset any other rules
that trigger).
As far as Bayes training is concerned, beware that you may
not /want/ to
train the Bayes database with all of these items, some of
which may have
been whitelisted because of their negative impact on the
Bayes database,
as I explained above. Conversely, if the senders you're
planning to
whitelist aren't likely to send you things that diverge from
the
Bayesian norms of your database, there's no need to
whitelist them in
the first place.
> 2) After looking at the docs, I don't see anything that
indicates a facility
> like the new penpals facility in amavisd-new. Is this
available now, or
> coming soon?
I've been debating this for the same reasons I've mentioned
above with
respect to whitelisting. The penpals system is effectively
just a means
of auto-whitelisting the people you send mail to, on the
premise that
they must be legitimate senders in turn. While that's a
reasonable
idea, it would seem to lead to an unnecessarily broad
whitelisting
policy that would ultimately deprive your Bayes database of
/all/
sources of legitimate mail to learn from.
On the other hand, in Maia 1.1.x we're looking at ways to
refine the
whitelisting system to allow you to specify whether a given
whitelist
entry should be used for Bayes training or not. That sort
of
enhancement would make it practical to do the sort of bulk
whitelisting
and penpaling that you're looking for, since it would make
items from
whitelisted or blacklisted senders conditionally available
for training
on a per-sender basis. Your whitelisted porn newsletter
sender, then,
could be marked with the "do not train" flag,
while your business
partner's address could be marked with the default
"train" flag.
- --
Robert LeBlanc <rjl renaissoft.com>
Renaissoft, Inc.
Maia Mailguard <http://www.maiamail
guard.com/>
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