[Mimedefang] user_prefs not working

[Sidney Markowitz]

tasdevil at newsguy.com asked:
> I can't seem to get the user_prefs for whitelist overrideing working.

This is a problem that is inherent in what MIMEDefang is supposed to do: It
is a milter, which means that it runs early in the sendmail processing,
before a message has been sent to individual recipients and before alias
processing. At that stage a message that has multiple recipients is still
one message, and a message with recipient addresses that are in the aliases
file still does not contain its eventual recipient addresses. There is no
good way to decide whose user_prefs you would use for the message.

MIMEDefang does have a subroutine you can define that will be called once
for each recipient in the envelope, but you probably don't want to use that
because 1) it will cause every message such as a newsletter that is
addressed to a lot of users at your site to be multiplied and processed
through sendmail separately; and 2) it won't work with aliases anyway.

Someday someone will come up with a good solution for this. Maybe it would
make sense to do some kind of site-wide SpamAssassin processing in
MIMEDefang and run a mini-SpamAssassin in each user's procmail that adjusts
scores based on their whitelist, or maybe scores the rules that the global
processing labeled as matching.

Personally I use a combined whitelist and user_pref on my server, but I can
get away with that because the only users are my spouse and I. If I were an
ISP that would not be practical.

 -- sidney