We have a really huge whitelist - all inserted in user_prefs using "whitelist_from". But I constantly get told that mails from people at this list got flagged as spam. That makes me wonder... do I have to do something specific to make sure sa honors "whitelist_from"? Does it only shift the score or bypass scanning?
It only shifts the score, but by -100, so that's a pretty hefty shift. Unless the message has a GTUBE in it, it should be OK. You should see the rule USER_IN_WHITELIST show up for matching emails.
SA has no "bypass" support. If you want to bypass scanning, do that in your tool that calls SA in the first place, you'll save more CPU this way than if SA did it.
Also make sure SA understands your configfiles... run spamassassin --lint to check for syntax errors.. one bad error can cause a lot of your config file to get skipped, thus disabling your whitelists.
