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Auto White List

What is it? The auto-whitelist, or AWL, tracks scores for your regular correspondents in a small on-disk database. With EnServe it is enabled by default.
The AWL is actually a very simple system. In short, the AWL is a score averaging system. It keeps track of the historical average of a sender, and pushes any subsequent mail towards that average.
So if someone that never sent you mail before sends you a mail that scores 20, and then sends you a second mail that would score 2.0 without the AWL, the AWL will push the score up to 11 on the second mail. This is auto blacklisting, based on their past history of spam.
If that same person sent you a mail that scored 0, and then later sent one that scored 7, the AWL would push the score down to 3.5. This is auto-whitelisting based on past history of nonspam.
A "sender" is identified using both the address they sent with, and their IP address, so spam claiming to be From you with forged headers will fail to get through.

Someone has been added to the Auto-white List how do I remove them?

Login as root  
su - amavis This will switch you over to the user amavis who
owns the list of users in the white-list

At the $ prompt enter:

Once done - ^D (or type exit) and you are back as root. The user 'user@domain' has been removed from the Auto-White List

I removed them last week and now they are blocked again!!!

Yes - if that user is determined to have been sending spam again (it happens here when testing!!!) they will be assigned a high 'Spam Score'.
You have a couple of options:

I don't like the Auto-White list - can I switch it off.

Yes - remove the '-a' from the spamd line in /etc/rc2.d/S99Spam then stop and start the demon.


FAQ's