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how_to:whitelist_blacklist

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Spamfilter Whitelist & Blacklist

The VPOP3 spamfilter has a whitelist and a blacklist.

By default, whenever you send a message, the recipient's address will be added to the whitelist, this is because VPOP3 will assume that the recipient is someone you want to be in contact with. Similarly, if you release a message from the spamfilter quarantine, the sender's address will be added to the whitelist.

What the whitelist and blacklist do

When an address is found on the whitelist or blacklist, then the spam score is adjusted by 100 x (the relevant rule weight. With the default settings, this means that an entry on the whitelist has '-10000' added to it, and an entry on the blacklist has '10000' added to it. So, if an entry is in the whitelist AND the blacklist, they will cancel each other out.

If you wish, you could adjust the rule weights so that one has precedence over the other, eg set the whitelist weight to '-150' to make the whitelist overrule the blacklist, or the blacklist weight to '150' to make the blacklist overrule the whitelist.

Blacklist

VPOP3 will never automatically add an address to the blacklist. This is because most spammers will fake the sender's email address, so it is pointless adding an address to the blacklist, and can even be harmful if the spammer has sent a message pretending to be from a legitimate user.

Because of this it is often not worthwhile putting addresses onto the Blacklist manually either. The only case that is generally useful is if you have signed up to a mailing list, and they are refusing to remove you from the list, but this is quite rare.

Local Addresses

If you put an address on the whitelist which is also in a 'local domain', then, by default VPOP3 will ignore that when checking incoming mail. This is because spammers often send spam pretending to be from the same domain as the recipient. In most cases, mail from local domains will be sent locally, not incoming, so, usually, this is a sensible rule to follow.

If you want to tell VPOP3 to check the whitelist for incoming mail from local domain email addresses as well, then go to Settings → Spamfilter → General, go to the Script Configuration tab, and set CheckLocalWhitelist to 1.

Note that in many cases, external users can actually send mail through VPOP3 as if they were local users, so their mail won't be spam filtered at all.

how_to/whitelist_blacklist.1357893927.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/11/14 10:44 (external edit)