Re: [Exim] Whitelist to

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Chris Edwards wrote:

> | I know lots of you use exim, spamassassin and exiscan so maybe one of
> | you could answer this question. If I decide to tell exiscan to reject
> | any message with a spam score over 20 what happens if one of the
> | addressees is in the "whitelist_to" part of local.cf in spamassassin.
> | Would that user still get a copy even if the spam score was over 20, and
> | if so would it also go to all the other recipients in the envelope
> | header ?
>
> Scanning at SMTP-time its all or nothing.

By the time it's reached SA, indeed it is.

One way to handle spam rating for different kinds of addressee, is to
classify the recipients at RCPT time. (This has been discussed on the
list before). If the first recipient is a spam-lover, then you only
accept the mail for other spam-lovers, and issue a defer for any
spam-haters; the offering MTA is supposed to retry later for the ones
which you have deferred.

That way, you can apply different rejection and spam-rating rules to
two kinds of recipient (or even more, if you want to!). A flag set
e.g in an additional header can be tested in SA, since SA doesn't have
access to the envelope addresses.

Conversely, when the first recipient is a spam-hater you can defer all
the spam-lovers. This doesn't quite work as advertised - since some
spammers won't bother to retry after a defer, but it's good enough for
most practical purposes, I'd say.