Are you looking for how to whitelist a sender in Amavis?

We can do it in two ways, either by hard whitelisting or by soft whitelisting.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to whitelist senders in Amavis, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers whitelist senders in Amavis.

A glance on Amavis

Amavis aka A Mail Virus Scanner is an open-source content filter for emails. It actually does this with the help of external content filters like SpamAssassin. Additionally, provides protection against spam, viruses and other malware.

Hence, Amavis is an interface between MTA and content filters. It can even check for threats in the email attachments. We can use Amavis to both blacklist and whitelist senders.

Now, let’s see how our Support Engineers whitelist senders in Amavis.

How to whitelist a sender in Amavis?

As we have discussed there are two ways to whitelist a sender in Amavis. Customers often approach us with a request to whitelist a sender. Then our Support Engineers choose between the two options. Here let’s have a look at both the options.

Hard sender whitelist

By whitelisting a sender, we ensure that the Amavis allows the mail from the sender to the recipient.

For doing this our Support Engineers specifies the sender address in the amavisd config file.

There are different ways of specifying the sender addresses in the config file. For instance, we can enter it as an array. And this appears as,

We can also give the domain name so that all the emails from that domain will be sent to the recipient.

Soft sender whitelist

In this approach, we basically add score points to the SpamAssassin score for senders. And these points determine whether to blacklist a domain or to whitelist it.

If the score is positive then it gets blacklisted and when it is negative, it gets whitelisted. For blacklisting, our Support Engineers add the code as follows,

Here we can add multiple domains and subdomains as per requirement.

[Still, having difficulty in whitelisting sender in Amavis? – We can help you to fix it.]

Conclusion

In short, using Amavis we can whitelist the sender in two ways. In hard sender whitelist, we specify the sender address in the amavis config file. Whereas, in soft sender whitelist we specify score points. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers do this.