At 02:50 PM 3/5/2005, Barrie Slaymaker wrote:
Personaly, I find this dangerous. I strongly disagree with the practice of "seeding" the AWL.. You really shouldn't have to, nor want to.
Would you mind explaining why you find this to be dangerous?
Because it creates a false method for "fixing" false positive problems, one that could be easily over-relied upon as a cure-all for FP problems. However:
1) AWL based whitelisting decays over time, becoming less effective as the number of messages received increases. (i.e.: on the first message, it's worth -(100/1)/2 = -50. After 50 messages it's worth (-100/50)/2 = -1.
2) An admin using this method may react to spam by increasing scores, or do other things to the config which would ordinarily cause false positives. The AWL seeding would make the problems non-obvious until a new sender comes along, or the AWL seeding from 1 occurs.
Using the AWL as a manual whitelist is a crutch and a hack at absolute best. If you really need a whitelist, use whitelist_from_rcvd entries, or even better, procmail around SA for them.
