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autoforcewhitelist enterprise issues

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hookjd View Drop Down
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    Posted: 26 June 2007 at 6:06pm
Since we have upgraded to the Enterprise version of Spamfilter, we have had numerous complaints from clients about emails continuing to be blocked when coming from the same users.  Indeed, I have had this problem myself.  I try to install all incremental upgrades as soon as I notice them, including installing the latest release today. 

Is this something that is a known issue with some versions of Enterprise?  Or should I be concerned about my MySQL connections or overload?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote LogSat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 June 2007 at 10:47pm
Could you please explain more in detail what exactly you mean by "emails continuing to be blocked when coming from the same users"?

This is our interpretation of the above statement, so I apologize if we misunderstood it.

In most installations, SpamFilter is implemented so that it accepts emails originating from the internet. Internal users will always use your company's main mail server to send emails, not SpamFilter. For this reason, if an email originating from the internet has a "from" address belonging to one of your domains, it most likely is spam.
There are two filters that can be used to block emails fitting this scenario. The first is

"Reject if Mail From = Mail To"

and the second is

"Reject if From Domain = To Domain"

The first is less strict than the second. If you have users who are sending emails to themselves, but are not using your mail server to do so, you will either need to disable the above filters, or train the users in behaving differently.

Another filter that is used to prevent spammers from sending emails by faking your domain as the sender is the SPF filter (see http://spf.pobox.com for details). If you enabled the SPF record in your DNS, you should configure it to allow other servers to be able to relay emails on your behalf.

SpamFilter ISP "standard" and SpamFilter Enterprise employ the exact same filtering techniques, so the upgrade should have not caused similar problems, as long as you've imported your SpamFilter ISP "standard" settings to your Enteprise version.
Roberto Franceschetti

LogSat Software

Spam Filter ISP
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote hookjd Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 June 2007 at 12:08pm
Sorry, its pretty simple.  My client has someone send them an email from an outside mail server.  It gets blocked for some reason... invalid mx record or something like that.  My client logs into the web control panel and releases it from quarantine.  Spamfilter is supposed to add an entry to the autowhitelistforcedelivery so that that outside user is always whitelisted to my client.  An entry something like this:

outside@user.com|myclient@domain.com

Correct?

Before we upgraded to enterprise, this worked flawlessly.  these entries were stored in a text file called autowhitelistforcedelivery.txt (if I'm not mistaken).  Now these entries are supposed to be in the database.  Well.... I have had numerous clients tell me that even though they have released emails from quarantine, the same person sending them email continues to get blocked by spamfilter.  So.... either, the updating of this list is not happening correctly, or the process that queries this list is not happening correctly.  I'm not sure which.  I have some clients that tell me they have continuing issues to certain senders and I can't find entries in the table for them.  And other clients I see clearly DO have entries in the table but they report problems. 

From a larger perspective, we continue to have lingering performance problems that lead me to believe this might just be an indication of a larger problem.  About once a month we have a problem where the delivery of items that are released from quarantine stops happening.  I can see the entries in the MySQL table (deliver = '1'), but the emails don't get sent.  I have to restart the service and then all is well.  We also occassionally have a problem with spamfilter simply shutting down.  The service just stops working.  This happens roughly once every two months. 

On first glance it may seem that my server is having issues, but we see nothing wrong with this machine in any other capacity.  It has performed nearly flawlessly for a number of years now. 

So.... any ideas if these issues are related or perhaps just some thoughts on my autowhitelist issues?

Thanks much.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote LogSat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 June 2007 at 4:29pm
hookjd,

You are correct on your assumptions on the first part of the above post.

For the second half, going back to your problem, before we continue with the troubleshooting, could you please let us know what build of SpamFilter you are using? There was a bug that could have caused a similar impact in an earlier version of SpamFilter:

// New to VersionNumber = '3.5.3.677';
{TODO -cNew : SpamFilter Enterprise was deleting and re-inserting the entire AutoWhiteListForceDelivery list in the database when appending a new entry, possibly causing data loss in high traffic scenarios. This process was rewritten to append the new individual records only}

Roberto Franceschetti

LogSat Software

Spam Filter ISP
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote hookjd Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29 June 2007 at 2:30am
ah-hah!  Yes, I upgraded on the 26th to 3.5.3.678.  Before that I was running 3.5.3.674

so hopefully that fixed my problem.
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