Scalability of 'spam.whitelist.rules' facility

[Quentin Campbell]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
>bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Julian Field
>Sent: 21 May 2007 15:40
>To: MailScanner discussion
>Subject: Re: Scalability of 'spam.whitelist.rules' facility
>
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>[snip]
Julian wrote:
>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?
>
Julian

Thanks for the helpful suggestion. I hope I have the skills to implement
it!  

The bulk of the whitelist rules entries are 'From:' complete addresses. 

However there are some regular expressions and some To: addresses as
well in the whitelist rules file.

I suppose there is no reason why I cannot combine your Custom Function
and db approach for the complete addresses _and_ leave a stub
spam.whitelist.rules file containing the remaining handful of regular
expressions and To: addresses?

Quentin