From: "Rob McEwen (PowerView Systems)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> The reason that I ask is because I'm wondering whether whitelisting is
really a good idea. It seems like every article in the world on spam filters
says, "a product MUST allow for whitelisting senders or it is no good".
>
> However:
>
> (1) I suspect that the ability to whitelisting senders is more of a way
for poor spam filters to hide their poor quality from those situations where
their blocking of legit messages would be most noticed. Often, blocked legit
messages go unnoticed... until someone you know personally says, "did you
get my message about...". Whitelisting senders minimizes such situations...
but, ideally, a filter shouldn't block legit messages to begin with.
Positively not true, Rob. Whitelisting allows you to junk the persistent
mortgage spam and still get email from specific sources about mortgages.
If the LKML was spam free I'd simply whitelist it since it tends to hit
some of the chickenpox rules rather badly. (I think there is one chickenpox
rule I need to disable, anyway. It seems to trigger on messages with a lot
of > > > quotes.
> (2) A second problem with whitelisting senders is the potential to
whitelist spam that is being sent by a virus which simply played musical
chairs with someone address book. Theoretically, a spam virus could "go to
town" if the recipient had whitelisted the same sender that the virus
randomly picked to place in the "FROM" of that spam.
This is indeed a problem. Whitelists must be used very judiciously. (I use
an extreme form of whitelist on this list, for example. I have procmail
completely bypass SpamAssassin for this list.
What I cannot do is wrap my head around "automated whitelisting." That
concept seems to be remarkably prone to falsely whitelisting spammers.
{^_^}
