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Viewing And Modifying SpamAssassin's AWL Auto-Whitelist in 10.5 Server

SpamAssassin in OS X 10.5 Server maintains a dynamic auto-whitelist (AWL) of email senders. The AWL modifies the calculated spam scores for incoming and outgoing email according to the previous history of emails from that sender.

Sometimes you may want to modify the AWL entry for a sender. For example, if a sender has been forwarding junk mail to the junkmail user (for spam training) rather than redirecting it then they will be flagged as the sender and not the real original sender. This will cause the local user's AWL score being moved up towards spam-sender territory and may even result in outgoing mail from that user being tagged as spam by their own email server. This would be evident by looking at the AWL score in a sent message header.

There are a couple of SpamAssassin commands for modifying AWL entries for the above scenario...

Blame This Man...

Next time your email inbox gets swamped, this is the man to blame...

His name is Ray Tomlinson, and he is almost singularly responsible for the email revolution after developing in 1971 the code which enabled the sending of a message between two computers for the first time.

At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to a colleague, he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."

Feel free to print out his picture, pin it to the wall, and give it a stern look next time your mail application goes boing!

http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/1586229.stm
http://www.bbn.com/about/timeline/at_sign