SpamAssassin is an invaluable tool for keeping spam out of your Inbox, but let’s face it, sometimes our friends look like spammers too.
Whether they forward junk mail with a real message on top that you *do* want to read, or if their outlook “stationary” screams of vintage blinking 1995ish internet, there’s two ways to solve this:
1) Get new friends
2) Whitelist them
Since canceling our friendships isn’t generally a good life-move, let’s whitelist them in SpamAssassin.
The first step is locating and opening your user prefs or configuration file. If you’re the server administrator, and want the whitelist entries to be global, you’ll want to edit:
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf
To edit the prefs for just a single user, you’ll want to look here:
~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
For each sender you want to to whitelist, add the following entry into the config or prefs file:
whitelist_from user@domain.com
You can also whitelist every sender from an entire domain with the following entry:
whitelist_from *@domain.com
For even more information and options, checkout the SpamAssassin doc page for whitelisting:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ManualWhitelist