Speaking of AWL...

[Matt Kettler]

At 04:08 PM 2/7/2005, Dave Duffner - NWCWEB.com wrote:
>         Is it better to turn off the AWL feature of either
>MS or SA and just maintain our own white/black lists using
>2.6?

Well, Only SA has an AWL feature. It's just where you turn it off that
differs between SA 2.6 and SA 3.0. (In 2.6 you use MailScanner.conf, in 3.0
you use the local.cf)



>  Is there any real benefit to AWL'ing if we have our
>own maintained list of what's kosher in our servers?  We're
>not talking huge loads of clients here, so hands-on is not
>a problem.


Quite frankly, I'm not a big fan of either the AWL, nor static whitelists.

IMO, the AWL may be useful, but really only in the single-user case. It's
semi-OK in the multi-user case, but it's value is diluted greatly. It's
also slightly subject to abuse by spammers (if they figure out how). Play
with it, and use it if you like it, leave it if you don't. I myself don't
care for it.

For me static whitelists are really a "method of last resort" as they are
just a way of covering up other problems with your SA setup that could be
better fixed by configuration or rule adjustment. However, cooking up rule
tweaks isn't exactly the simplest thing to do, so for many admins,
whitelists are the way to go. However, no admin should need to create very
many whitelist entries.

If you find yourself creating lots of whitelists to avoid rampant FP
problems, I'd strongly suggest stepping back and looking at why you're
getting so many FP's in the first place.

I personally run with only one whitelist command, plus SA's default set. In
the past week no messages would have scored over +2.8 without the bonuses
of the whitelists.

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------
To unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/) and
the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).

Support MailScanner development - buy the book off the website!