On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 07:29 -0600, Daniel J McDonald wrote: > That's the issue with pulling all of the whitelists out of the scoring > mix - the whitelist components are part of the mix that allows 5 points > to indicate spam. And I was trying to counter the argument that we > should simply rip those pieces out and expect that, when people > re-assemble them piecemeal, the end result will still be 5 points for > spam... > Clarification: I, for one, was only proposing that the whitelisting plugins and rules that query external databases are removed from the standard ruleset and sa_update and placed in a separate library of optional rules.
My reasons for making this suggestion are: - all URIBL tests can be disabled with skip_rbl_checks. All whitelist/blacklist rules should be controlled by this preference, hence it should already be possible to disable them without impacting any other standard rule. - they can safely be excluded from sa_update since the rule(s) and plugin will not change during the life of an SA version. Apart from bugfixes all changes[*] that affect message scoring are applied to the external database by its maintainer. - the act of separating these rules from the main rule corpus makes it clear to SA admins that they are optional. It also has the side-effect of removing their maintenance workload from SA devs. [*] apart from score adjustment, obviously. Martin
