Whitelisting a user
Adding a user to your whitelist gives them a -100 score, which has the effect of always marking their mail as non-spam.
To manually whitelist a particular address, say d.cary@sparkingwire.com, edit your local user prefs file ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs:
# whitelist David Cary: whitelist_from d.cary@sparkingwire.com
Whitelist and blacklist addresses are file-glob-style patterns, so
friend@somewhere.com, *@isp.com, or *.domain.net will all work.
# whitelist everyone at sparkingwire.com: whitelist_from *@sparkingwire.com
To manually blacklist, use blacklist_from to add an address to your blacklist.
If the sender is at all well known (such as a mailing list), you should use whitelist_from_rcvd instead so that a spammer can't forge their mail to look like it's from the whitelisted address. More info on whitelist_from, whitelist_from_rcvd, and blacklist_from is on the [http://www.spamassassin.org/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html web] or can be accessed from your local man pages by typing perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf.
Some good, free web-based tools are available to put a friendly user interface on whitelists (and blacklists) and allow users to edit their own. See WebUserInterfaces.
How do I force AutoWhitelist certain addresses?
Technically, you can use spamassassin --add-addr-to-whitelist, but don't. The AutoWhitelist is designed as a score averaging system, not as a whitelisting system. If you want to manually whitelist, you should use the directions from the previous section.