Kevin,

We had tried in the past to have SpamFilter perform database lookups for each received email, but performance was incredibly degraded. No database platform was able to keep up with the queries in realtime as email was received. The only possible thing that did not affect performance was to "add" new records with quarantined emails, since that did not require search queries.

For that reason, what you ask for is unfortunately not an option for now. The following workaround is the only thing I could think of to bypass the issue.

When a user chooses to force-deliver an email, the ResolveSpam.asp page sets the field "Deliver" in the tblQuarantine to 1. This causes SpamFilter to deliver that email within a few seconds. You can modify the code in that ASP page to add a codeword in the subject line of that email. That codeword can then be added to the whitelist keyword list that SpamFilter uses to whitelist emails with user-defined words in them.

It won't be as simple as changing the "Subject" value in the tblQuarantine, as that's not the actual subject itself. The Subject that will appear in the email is the "Subject:" email header that is contained in the actual email source. That source is in the "Msg" field in the tblMsgs table. You'll need to modify the ASP page to add the codeword after the "Subject:" string.

For the auto delivery text files, we'll look into why the files gets cleared out. It should not, as a matter of fact SpamFilter should reload it as soon as it's been changed by an external application. WHile we look into this a temporary workaround is to have each SpamFilter write to its own file in a subdirectory underneath the SpamFilter directory. You can then use Windows's file replication to keep those subdirectories in sync.

Unfortunately I have a negative answer to the date request as well. For performance reasons we need to have the white/black list files contain only the data being searhed for, without any comments or other non-pertinent characters. Whilte adding the date is not posssible, the addition of an entry in the autowhitelist file is being logged by SpamFilter in the activity log. Every time that happens, the following entry is creaed in the logs:

Adding to AutoWhiteListForceDelivery.txt: from@email | to@email

so you can track down when it was done.

Roberto F. LogSat Software

We have written an ASP.net solution that runs as a service for the autowhiteliet.  It takes the autowhitelist text files, looks for changes form our two spamfilters, addes them to a mySql table, removes duplicates then copies the end result over the spamfilter txt files.  The end result -- both of our servers have the same whitelist.  This works for us.Before we wrote this solution we were able to acomplish a simular solution using cmd files on a schedule.  The cmd files launched a command line sort utility that merged the autowhitelist files and removed duplicates. Hope this give you some ideas.

Dwight

Kevin,

I'm afraid I still may not have understoode the question at this point. In cases where there are multiple SpamFilter instances running on multiple servers, all accessing the same database, whenever a user chooses to force-delivery of an email, the smae server that originally blocked the email will be the one who will take care of delivering it. Each record in the tblQuarantine table has a "ServerID" field which indicates which server blocked it. Every few seconds SpamFilter issues a simple query to pull records with its ServerID that have the "Deliver" field set to one. This query is very fast and has no performance effect. Should there be any email for that server to force deliver, it will do so. If you wish to disable this option, rather than adding an option in SpamFilter, we leave it up to the users to disable the checkbox that causes this from the web interfaces. But this answer is too simple, so I'm guessing I did not understand the question again...

Roberto F.

LogSat Software