At 05:38 PM 8/4/2003 -0700, Justin Mason wrote:
Simon Byrnand writes:
>By default will it try to use one common AWL database, or will each user
>have their own AWL database ? If both options are possible which is
>recommended ?

By default, it will created the AWL in the name of the user that SA is executed as. In most server applications this winds up always being "root", "mail" or "nobody" depending on what server tools you use.


If you use spamc, you can pass the -u parameter to it, and SA will run as the user specified, and have a separate user_prefs, bayes db, and awl db in their home directory. But there must be a user account to do that.


I would suggest each user gets their own -- that seems to work well
(for me at least).

We *did* have a bug previously where a shared db could be poisoned by
a dictionary attack, as the score gradually lowered (on the assumption
that repeat mails from the same person were likely to be nonspam).  This
has been fixed since 2.4x though.   So shared should work OK as well...

With a shared DB you do have to be quite careful as it has some unexpected side effects, but it's not entirely impossible.


For sure you should make sure you don't mix a shared AWL database with any all_spam_to statements.. This makes for some interesting ways for a spammer to earn a whitelist entry by accidentally spamming your whitelisted account first, then dropping spams on your other accounts. The AWL will have a massive -100 entry from the first spam sent to the whitelisted account, and every subsequent spam they send with the same from and source IP block will have that in the average.

It's not entirely unlike the problem where a all_spam_to causes a multi-recipient mail to be whitelisted, but this has the added side effect of continuing to linger over a long period of time.

If at all possible, try to have separate AWL's per user.. it avoids a handful of weird pitfalls that are very confusing when they first happen.











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