help diagnose a mis-tagged email (not spam, tagged as spam)

[Jason Burnett]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 05:27:15PM -0400, Matt Kettler wrote:
> I'm not positive, but from a glance it looks like it got bumped up by the
> auto-whitelist feature of SpamAssassin, which despite its name, acts more
> commonly as an auto-black/greylist.
>
> What the AWL really does is try to push the score of an email towards the
> historical average for that user. If that user sent some email that got
> tagged for legit reasons, they probably have a high average and thus get
> their score bumped up.
>
> Recommendations to get around this:
>
> 1) don't use the AWL, or reduce the AWL factor.
> 2) don't SA scan emails that were actually delivered from IPs in your local
> domain. (use MailScanner's "accept spam from" to prevent local users mail
> from being scanned.)
> 3) delete that user's AWL entry using spamassassin -R and hope they don't
> send more spam-like mail.
>

It didn't dawn on me until reading this, but I've had all the users involved in
the Spamassassin/Mailscanner evaluation here send me all false-positives and
false-negatives, which were getting rescanned and added to their AWL score.

Mystery solved.  Thanks for the "accept spam from" tip.

--
Jason Burnett
jason at jnj.org
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