[Alpine-info] alpine and whitelisting?

[Rob Wolfconf via Alpine-info]

Dear Karen,


> My question has nothing to do with shellworld.


They thought you are asking about mails on shellworld, probably
because you have sent the email from shell world.

So back to your original question:


> Is there a process in alpine to white list an address, or domain, insuring

> mail reaches you from that location?

> This is tied to  the alpine setup currently managing my gmail, and  that

> connecting location's email.


As Andrew has already written, there is now process in alpine to do
anything with spam or false positive spam or ham.

Alpine is just IMAP client, UI to your mails stored on the mail
server. Another UI is the WebMail UI from google. Other UI is
Thunderbird.

The spam decision is made on the target server, in your case the Gmail
server. The server decides, if the email is spam or not and stores the
email either in Junk Folder (if the email is spam) or (if the email is
not spam) process filter rules stored on gmail server (if any) and
stores the email to some other folder according to filters.

Then you connect with alpine over IMAP to display content of the
folders. If you have defined some filter rules in alpine, then alpine
process the emails in the folders and can move the emails to other
folders.

Usually the antispam configuration and/or rules are available in the
WebUI of the provider, in this case google. Some IMAP servers use
sieve filters, which can be managed over WebUI IMAP Client (e.g.
roundcube or rainloop, maybe Thunderbird too). But the antispam
solution is separated from sieve/filtering rules. Sometimes can be
antispam solution completely disabled (I have disabled it by google on
my account). And sometimes you can really define your own whitelist
and block/blacklists (O365), or sometimes it's mixed -
whitelist/blacklist and spam/ham learning - you can mark some
delivered email as spam, or you can mark some email in junk as
non-spam and antispam solution should learn, because blacklisting does
not work, if spammers use random email addresses.


> Is the only way to white list in alpine via a spam filtering program?


No. Alpine is IMAP client, not antispam filter. You have to do it on
the server, probably in the WebUI. Only thing you can do is to create
filter, which moves all emails from Junk Folder to INBOX as soon as
you open Junk folder in alpine.

Regards,

Robert.