Whitelist

A 'White List' is a list of people that will always be allows through the system. You need to 'WhiteList' people that the system initially decides are spam.
This is usually the case for Companies you deal with that send out newsletters and special offers - the system will block them as they are spam.
You add their address(es) to a 'Whitelist' so they are passed straight through.

How Do you do this?

Look at the message that was tagged as spam and make a note of the 'From:' Address - Lets look at an example:

| Date: 24 May 2004 11:56:18 GMT
| From: sales.orders@rsgb.org.uk
| Subject: *****SPAM***** Order Number: TM13EP10000252
| To: tom@tkrh.demon.co.uk
| Reply-To: sales.orders@rsgb.org.uk
| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

The From: address above is 'sales.orders@rsgb.org.uk' and we do want to allow that to pass.

While we are looking at the headers, let take the above example a little further:

|X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS 0.3.12
|X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=3.6 required=3.5
|	tests=DEAR_SOMEBODY,LINES_OF_YELLING,MSG_ID_ADDED_BY_MTA_3,
|	      NO_REAL_NAME,SPAM_PHRASE_03_05
|	version=2.43-tom01
|X-Spam-Flag: YES
|X-Spam-Level: ***
|X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.43-tom01 (1.115.2.20-2002-10-15-exp)

This shows the message was scanned, and the 'score' was 3.6 - this system has the 'Required_Score' set at 3.5 so it was spam tagged. As to the tests,

SPAM: 
SPAM: Content analysis details:   (3.60 hits, 3.5 required)
SPAM: NO_REAL_NAME       (1.3 points)  From: does not include a real name
SPAM: DEAR_SOMEBODY      (0.1 points)  BODY: Contains 'Dear Somebody'
SPAM: SPAM_PHRASE_03_05  (1.1 points)  BODY: Spam phrases score is 03 to 05 (medium)
SPAM: LINES_OF_YELLING   (0.2 points)  BODY: A WHOLE LINE OF YELLING DETECTED
SPAM: MSG_ID_ADDED_BY_MTA_3 (0.9 points)  'Message-Id' was added by a relay (3)
SPAM: 

That shows what tests were carried out and the score for each.

There are ways to alter the score assigned to each test - if you have someone who always 'SHOUTS' e.g. types everything in capitals - then you could adjust 'LINES_OF_YELLING' down a little (or tell them not too!!). We will cover that in a furture FAQ.

Anyway, we want to allow 'sales.orders@rsgb.org.uk' through the system.

Use the admin menu:

->

For whitelist, prefix the address with whitelist_from. You enter one option per line and can have has many entries as required.

For the rsgb we would enter:

whitelist_from sales.orders@rsgb.org.uk

That's it - that address will get through - but - that is one specific address - is there anyone else in 'rsgb.org.uk' that may mail you? If so they _may_ be caught up in spam as well. You can handle this by using 'wildcards' - these match multiple addresses, if we were to change the above to:

whitelist_from *@rsgb.org.uk

Here are some examples from one of our local whitelists.

whitelist_from  *@ebay.co.uk        
whitelist_from  *@redhouse.co.uk
whitelist_from  BFC_Offer@bmail.bca.co.uk
whitelist_from  *@homebasenews.co.uk
whitelist_from  *@xmr3.com
whitelist_from  *@pd.fwdto.com
whitelist_from  *@thebookpeople.co.uk
whitelist_from  *@rsgb.org.uk
whitelist_from  *@morethan.com
whitelist_from  *list.sco.com
whitelist_from  *@homeshoppingdirect2.com

BlackLists

The same procedure can be used 'blacklist_from' - this will always refuse the user. However, we would recommend you use the Black list option in the mailer as it is more efficient - See the Black List FAQ.