Unblacklist an Address or Domain

Question

OK, I realize this is not a huge issue, but it's frustrating me and I would like to learn the solution. One of my staff is getting married and signed up with "theknot.com" This site sends offers from the email address "[email protected]" The trouble is that my amvisd.conf file is set up to soft-blacklist senders with "offers" in the sender address. In general, this makes good filtering sense, but I would like to allow "[email protected]" to get through.
In other words, the following line appears in my amavisd.conf file:
new_RE( # regexp-type lookup table, just happens to be all soft-blacklist
[qr'^(bulkmail|offers|cheapbenefits|earnmoney|foryou)@'i => 5.0],
I tried adding "unblacklist_from [email protected]" to "/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf", but that has no effect (whitelisting and blacklisting there usually works fine).
The email still gets quarantined with the header:
Delivered-To: spam-quarantine
X-Envelope-From: <[email protected]>
X-Envelope-To: <[email protected]>
X-Quarantine-ID: <151zZ4Ihi34J>
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Score: 5
X-Spam-Level: **************************************************************
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=x+5 tag=x tag2=5.5 kill=7 BLACKLISTED tests=[]
Received: from mail.prufrock.com ([127.0.0.1])
by localhost (mail.prufrock.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024)
with ESMTP id 151zZ4Ihi34J for <[email protected]>;
Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:14:19 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from ranger.intranet.theknot.com (ranger.theknot.com [38.96.130.141])
by mail.prufrock.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7C6011EA963
for <[email protected]>; Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:14:19 -0500 (CDT)
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 9:10:50 -0500
Subject: Local Sponsor Invitation: Warren Barron September Trunk Shows
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Any ideas about why unblacklisting this isn't working?

Answer 1

I think I may have figured this out. I will not know for sure until I see something from "[email protected]" pass through again. However, just in case anyone is interested, I'll explain what I think is at work here.
By the way, what I am about to say applies to the newest version of the amavisd.conf file. It is not an issue with the older amavisd.conf file that comes with the stock 10.4 server install.
"Section V" of the new amavisd.conf file seems to have two kinds of blacklisting -- SOFT BLACKLISTING AND BLACKLISTING. Both are uncommented in the the unedited amavisd.conf file.
The first type, SOFT BLACKLISTING, takes a soft approach and just adds score points to e-mails from certain senders:
# Instead of hard black- or whitelisting, a softer approach is to add
# score points (penalties) to the SA score for mail from certain senders."
The second type, BLACKLISTING, takes a "hard" approach:
# BLACKLISTING: messages from specified SENDERS are DECLARED SPAM.
Since the file comes with both of these types uncommented, the hard blacklisting overrides soft blacklisting.
To solve this problem, I commented out the following HARD BLACKLIST lines:
# illustrates the use of regexp lookup table:
@blacklistsendermaps = ( new_RE(
qr'^(bulkmail|offers|cheapbenefits|earnmoney|foryou|greatcasino)@'i,
qr'^(investments|loseweighttoday|market\.alert|money2you|MyGreenCard)@'i,
qr'^(new\.tld\.registry|opt-out|opt-in|optin|saveonlsmoking2002k)@'i,
qr'^(specialoffer|specialoffers|stockalert|stopsnoring|wantsome)@'i,
qr'^(workathome|yesitsfree|your_friend|greatoffers)@'i,
qr'^(inkjetplanet|marketopt|MakeMoney)\d*@'i,
I left the SOFT BLACKLIST table active. I think this will fix the problem.