Adding a user to your whitelist gives them a -100 score, which has the effect of always marking their mail as non-spam.

To manually whitelist a particular address, say d.cary@sparkingwire.com, edit your local user prefs file ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs:

# whitelist David Cary:
whitelist_from  d.cary@sparkingwire.com

Whitelist and blacklist addresses are file-glob-style patterns, so friend@somewhere.com, *@isp.com, or *.domain.net will all work.

This is a quick doc I wrote up and used for 3.1 updates, it's possible to not be complete. - tvd

• make a tar file that you're happy with (#.tar.gz) make sure that you only include files! ie:

tar cf #.tar *

and not

tar cf #.tar .

• if you want, double check files-only with:

tar tvvf #.tar

• compress the tar file with gzip -9

• log into the zones machine

• sudo -u updatesd -s

Spam Filtering Overview

The SpamAssassin program. SpamAssassin is a powerful spam filter that was installed on the MUSes network in September 2002. At the time spam was beginning to emerge as more than a minor nuisance, and I had been looking into ways to effectively deal with spam on our local system. Of all the alternatives, SpamAssassin - a free program in the best of the Unix/Linux traditions - was almost universally regarded as the best option, at least for Unix/Linux platforms.

whitelist_from add@ress.com

required_hits n.nn (default: 5)

rewrite_subject { 0 | 1 } (default: 0)

By default, the subject lines of suspected spam will not be tagged. This can be enabled here.

fold_headers { 0 | 1 } (default: 1)

ok_languages xx [ yy zz ... ] (default: all)

This option is used to specify which languages are considered OK for incoming mail. SpamAssassin will try to detect the language used in the message text.

Note that the language cannot always be recognized with sufficient confidence. In that case, no points will be assigned.

The rule UNWANTED_LANGUAGE_BODY is triggered based on how this is set.

use_dcc ( 0 | 1 ) (default: 1)

Whether to use DCC, if it is available.

dcc_timeout n (default: 10)

How many seconds you wait for dcc to complete before you go on without the results

dcc_body_max NUMBER

dcc_fuz1_max NUMBER

auto_whitelist_factor n (default: 0.5, range [0..1])

How much towards the long-term mean for the sender to regress a message. Basically, the algorithm is to track the long-term mean score of messages for the sender (mean), and then once we have otherwise fully calculated the score for this message (score), we calculate the final score for the message as:

finalscore = score + (mean - score) * factor

These settings differ from the other spamassassin options, in that they are considered 'privileged'. Only users running spamassassin from their procmailrc's or forward files, or sysadmins editing a file in /etc/mail/spamassassin, can use them. spamd users cannot use them in their user_prefs files, for security and efficiency reasons, unless allow_user_rules is enabled (and then, they may only add rules from below).