Whitelisted

Stephen Swaney Steve at swaney.com
Tue Jul 22 21:38:09 IST 2003


Actually I placed Ken A, Pacific.Net's excellent solution for this in
the MailScanner FAQ.


http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/serve/cache/169.html

How easy can it get.

Steve
Steve Swaney
steve at swaney.com

 On Tue, 2003-07-22 at 16:19, Derek Winkler wrote:

> See earlier thread on splitting messages with multiple recipients into
> messages with one recipient each as a workaround.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Kettler [mailto:mkettler at EVI-INC.COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 4:16 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at jiscmail.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Whitelisted
>
>
> At 12:00 PM 7/22/2003 -0600, Dustin Baer wrote:
> > > Dustin,
> > > Maybe that is where my misunderstanding is.  I thought, that would
> turn off
> > > spam filtering for that user only.  Does that say anything
> addressed to
> > that
> > > user and anyone else, will go through?
> >
> >Hi Kris,
> >
> >As far as I understand MailScanner's whitelisting, if one recipient
> is
> >in the whitelist, all recipients receive the message.  I have run
> into
> >your situation also, and refuse to whitelist recipient names here, if
> I
> >see that they receive a high volume of spam.  I don't want other
> people
> >getting spam, just because they want their name whitelisted.
> >
> >I am sure someone will correct me, if I have mis-stated how
> MailScanner
> >operates its whitelist.
>
> That is correct. And this "problem" is a fundamental limit of running
> at
> the MTA layer. It's not a bug, or a mistake, it's a design tradeoff
> between
> flexibility and efficiency.
>
> Mailscanner runs at the MTA layer, not the MDA layer, so there is not
> one
> copy of the message per user when MS sees it.. there's just one
> message
> with many recipients. Thus MailScanner can only whitelist that one
> message,
> or not whitelist it. There is no such thing as "well, later when you
> go to
> deliver this, give these guys this copy, and that guy this other
> version".
> It's one message, and they'll all get the same message, all
> MailScanner can
> do is edit it.
>
> Running at the MTA layer is much more efficient, because you only scan
> the
> message once, but it inherently has limits on "per user"
> customization. The
> MTA layer is the ideal spot to do virus scanning, because you rarely
> want
> user-specific behaviors for virus scanning. However doing spam
> scanning at
> the MTA layer is somewhat limiting if you've got users that need
> "exceptions".
>
> Personally I deal with it by creating custom SpamAssassin rules
> instead of
> whitelists. This gives me the ability to target specific kinds of
> messages,
> rather than specific sources or destinations. If I have to do a
> whitelist,
> I try to make it a "fromto" type whitelist where it winds up narrowly
> defined. I  never use To: type whitelists, and I avoid simple From:
> whitelists as well.
>
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