Scalability of 'spam.whitelist.rules' facility

[Julian Field]

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Quentin Campbell wrote:
> Our 'spam.whitelist.rules' file currently has over 4,000 entries and is
> growing at the rate of about 200-300 entries each week.
>
> At what point does the number of entries in the whitelist file become
> 'too many' and impact the performance of MailScanner?
>   
I would not advise more than about 1,000 entries in a ruleset. If you 
are doing more, then far better to have a little Custom Function that 
slurps in a db file at start time (and every "Restart Every" period) and 
just does a quick hash table lookup for each message. This would be 
hugely faster. If you set
    Restart Every = 3600
then it will re-read the whitelist every hour, which is probably 
frequent enough for most people most of the time, and makes it dead easy 
to implement.

The only restriction would be that each whitelist entry was a complete 
email address or complete domain name. Also, would they all be "From" 
rules? Is that okay?

If this is beyond your coding abilities, drop me a line off-list with as 
complete a spec as possible, including some examples lines from the 
input file you would use to hold the list.

In return for my writing it for you, a donation of some sort would be 
much appreciated. :-)

Jules.

> If all of our users requested just one address each to be whitelisted
> then 'spam.whitelist.rules' would have more than 20,000 entries!
>
> [The increase in requests to whitelist is probably because the recently
> enabled Bayesian filter in SpamAssassin has had a significant impact on
> increasing the amount of tagged spam but at the cost of an increase in
> false positives.]
>
> Quentin 
> ---
> PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Information Systems and Services (ISS),
>                            Newcastle University,
>                            Newcastle upon Tyne,
> FAX:   +44 191 222 8765    United Kingdom, NE1 7RU.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  
>   

Jules

- -- 
Julian Field MEng CITP
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store

MailScanner customisation, or any advanced system administration help?
Contact me at Jules at Jules.FM

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