On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 07:23 -0800, Gary Funck wrote: > Since this is a Spam Assassin list: Is there a way of disabling > grey listing, but still receiving some benefit from the principle > that mail received from a first time or infrequent sender should > be looked upon with some suspicion? > Yes. If you keep a list of the recipients of outgoing mail its easy to whitelist any mail you receive from them. This approach does what you want: a sender is treated as suspicious until you've sent mail to them and recipient list maintenance is easy to automate.
I use a mail archive system as my recipients list because it has a record of everybody I've sent mail to. I use an SA plugin to access the archive. The combination of it and an associated rule will whitelist anybody who is recorded in the archive as having received mail from me. However, the database archives messages at 4-6 /sec, so this and/or the storage requirements (4.3 GB to store 143,000 messages) may mean that, if you're a high volume site and/or don't need an archive, you'd be better off just keeping a list of the recipient(s) of outgoing messages. I wrote my archive for personal use because I can find an old e-mail with the archive search tool faster than I can by ferreting though a set of mail folders: it was never designed as a high volume solution, but should manage small business volumes quite easily with both it and SA running on a typical desktop PC. Up to early this year I was using an 866 MHz P3 with 512MB RAM that easily kept up while PostgreSQL,the archive, Postfix and SA. That is all now running on a 3GHz dual Athlon with 4 GB RAM but not going any faster - an upgrade to Fedora 16 forced the change because its installer wouldn't run in less than 1GB RAM. If you think my SA plugin or the mail archive would be of use to you, contact me off-list. Martin
