My understanding of a white list is it is allowable addresses.
In the white list there are several entries which I did not enter. Along side each entry is a tick box in which some are checked and some are not. Can anyone explain what this list is, Can I delete it and just add my own? What do the checked tick boxes do?
I generally do not recommend deleting whitelist rules. You can create your own, but this is rarely necessary because SpamSieve creates them automatically when you train messages as good, and when you receive good messages .
Rules that are checked are enabled. Disabled rules do not block any messages, but they are useful because they prevent SpamSieve from re-learning a rule that you don’t want. (See Rules and Training.)
When whitelists go wrong
I am having a similar problem, where my whitelist has thousands of rules in it that do not correspond to anything I would ever, ever have approved. Are things whitelisted unless you explicitly mark them as spam, or are they only added to the whitelist if you “Mark as good?”
I’m seriously considering deleting my entire whitelist and starting over, because it’s largely responsible for the amount of spam in my inbox right now.
SpamSieve whitelists an address when it thinks the message is good and you do not train it as spam.
That’s not the right solution. The whitelist would only be a problem on that scale if you were not correcting all the mistakes. And, in that case, due to auto-training, there would also be other problems that deleting the whitelist wouldn’t fix, such as incorrect information in the corpus. So if you have lots of enabled whitelist rules that are incorrect, you would need to completely reset SpamSieve. And correct the mistakes going forward so that you don’t get into this situation again.
Ohhh. I have assumed for the many many years I have used SpamSieve that the whitelist only includes addresses I specifically whitelisted by either adding them by hand or by using “Mark as good.” I thought that the auto-training was only updating the blacklist (that is, adding and removing to it), with the whitelist being entirely user-controlled.Suddenly many many things make more sense.
Yeah, sounds like it. That’ll be an adventure. I’ve been using SpamSieve essentially nonstop for… hm… 12 years and had no idea I was doing this wrong, despite reading through the manual related to this issue several times. I just never caught this bit.
I think this happens because when I get spam that slips past the filter and I happen to be reading on my phone or iPad, I just delete the message to get it out of the way, since I didn’t realize this particular ramification. Is there a way to get rid of these false negatives while on my iPhone that won’t make a mess of my whitelist over time? Does moving them to the “Spam” folder do the job?