On 2026-09-18 at 09:45:56 UTC-0400 (Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:45:56 +1000)
Nick Edwards <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
Jesus HC! How do we disable all of that,
Zero out the scores for the rules that check the default welcomelist(s).
Matus' post lists them but his approach of scoring to -0.01 preserves
the check as an informational aid. Using 0 eliminates even that.
Personally, I have those rules set to -2 because in my experience that's
all the relevant spammish-ham mail needs.
I know its 99% USA centric,
THIS IS TRUE BUT NOT INTENTIONAL. If users report to us that significant
amounts of mail from non-spammers (not even slight spammers...) is being
improperly marked as spam by SA, we will add a def_welcomelist_auth
entry. If users report that an entry is causing ANY spam to be labeled
as ham, we will remove it.
We work with the information available to us.
but
we've seen problems from some of them,
We happily accept reports of default welcomelist addresses used to spam,
and delete those entries when they are reported. Only major changes
(like the recent deletion of the att-mail.com entry that covered AT&T
business email) are announced here as notice to users. As with ALL
changes to SA, you can see these actions when they occur by following
the [email protected] mailing list or using Subversion to
keep track of the relevant rules files.
if there is no easy way, there needs
to be a kill switch for all "default" whitelisting, because frankly,
only
we, the each individual system administrator for our own domains and
networks, should be the only ones to decide who is trustworthy,
As I understand the history, the feature exists due to user demand.
I am not a huge fan of this feature, as I believe it puts us on the edge
of a major error of running a reputation service. However, I recognize
that not all mail admins think about their mail system every day or see
themselves primarily as mail admins. The last thing SA wants is a
reputation for mislabeling affirmatively desired mail as spam, because
that's how people give up on spam control.
those who
we trust we add in local.cf they should be the ones that S.A uses and
no
other, but there is more chance of a year round snow in Vegas before
default whitelisting is removed from the code base, so should be a
user
option to disable capability in one of the main conf file so people
know
its there.
Repeating to make sure it is understood: just score the rules to 0 in
your local.cf.
I suggest checking your own mailstream for mail which may be affected
before deploying that change.
On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 4:36 AM Bill Cole <[email protected]>
wrote:
An extremely helpful user alerted us to many bitrotted entries in the
default welcomelist, including domains which no longer resolve at
all,
ones which have changed control, and ones with DNS implying that they
do
not currently send mail.
In response, I have just committed changes to the 60_welcomelist*.cf
which remove a total of 41 domains. With the exception of
bdcimail.com,
which has recently been reregistered and used to send spam, these
entries are believed to be effectively dead: they match no mail of
any
sort.
--
Bill Cole
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com
addresses)
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