If you have friends enabled, then the user level 'filtering' rules are 
skipped if the message is from a friend.

We will add an 'isfriend()' function to the next build for mfilter.rul 
rules.

      ChrisP.

On Saturday 16/04/2011 at 5:07 am, surgemailHIDDEN@etwinsite.com 
wrote:
> Is there any way to bypass the surgemail and webmaster applied spam 
> rules for addresses that pass the "Friends Whitelist"?
>
> I had someone complain to me that he was not receiving messages from a 
> specific sender.  When I investigated I found out that the reason was 
> that the message contained a "four letter word" that we had added to 
> our spam filter rule.  Their friends function was turned on to add 
> outgoing addresses to their friends list.
>
> It became even more interesting when the tech who works with them, has 
> a local domain and thus email address on our server was unable to send 
> me a copy of the message to examine.  He is in MY friends list but it 
> was nailed by the filter.
>
> It seems to me if one designates a particular sender as a "friend" 
> there should be no reason at any level to block the sender although we 
> know that there are people who have nothing better to do with their 
> time than to hack into user accounts on yahoo, aol etc., harvest the 
> address books and send emails with the hacked user address to everyone 
> in the address book.  But, those typically do not get trapped by the 
> spam filtering anyway.
>
> The problem is some industries have folks who can't speak a sentence 
> without using some "quaint" colloquial term every fourth word.   They 
> write like they speak.  If the recipients are OK with this, there 
> should be some way to let these messages get through to them.  
> Especially when they have spam filtering turned off and the friends 
> list activated.  I am not too keen on removing these filters generally 
> but would really like a way to let those who are afraid to miss 
> something important completely bypass ALL filtering.
>
> Orin Wells
>
>
>