I've a some questions that I haven't felt were answered by the documentation I've read.
1. I'm concerned about the AutowhiteList function. It seems to work in the favor of spammers as I check all the mail marked as spam.
First, before thinking of the AWL as working "in favor" of anything, I'd suggest reading this one:
http://wiki.spamassassin.org/w/AwlWrongWay
If you're having problems with mis-marked spam, then yes, you've got a problem. If it's deducting 5 points from a 20+ point spam, that's very normal.
2. Do most people turn AutowhiteList off? I've heard the basic description of AutowhiteListing but still I can't understand the necessity?
I have it disabled.
I would not regard it as "necessary" but it is certainly useful in many cases. It's a score averager, and as such, it's going to "smooth out the bumps" in scores.
3. Also, if I have spam that has a really negative autowhitelist
score, how is the autowhitelisting affected when I run sa-learn as I do routinely as my spam corpus grows?
The AWL is not impacted by sa-learn at all. However, I'd suggest seeing #1 again.
4. Also should spamassassin NOT be called via spamd or CGPSA during an sa-learn session, or can that safely be done while spam is being processed by spamassassin?
It's safe to call SA via any method you like during sa-learn runs. The bayes DB has lockfiles to prevent more than one process from writing it at a time, and most runs of SA don't need to write the bayes db at all.
However, if any other spamassassin process wants to do any opportunistic bayes updates such as autolearning, or expiry, they will fail to get the lock and the bayes update will be skipped. The same thing also happens when there's multiple calls to spamassassin at a given moment and more than one decides to do learning. This is quite normal and doesn't really cause any problems (and it's better than the alternative of blocking up the mail queue).
Answers greatly appreciated!
Codger
