Hi Wes.
We have had A LOT of customers with this same issue.This is what I was told by SmarterTools support...
"First, I want to dive into how our "Trusted Sender" feature works.
Trusted Sender status will make it so that SmarterMail ignores the spam weight accumulated by an email when deciding where to deliver it. The spam checks are still run, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The special consideration with these 3 checks is that they can override the Trusted Sender status. So, if DMARC fails, we ignore the "Trusted Sender" status and the full spam weight of an email is used in determining its delivery.
In your particular case, this accumulated spam weight was 30 from Sniffer "Message Sniffer [code:60]: 30", and your intention was to skip this spam weight with the Trusted Sender feature. What occurred though, is that the skipped DMARC check counts as a 'fail' for the purposes of whether or not to ignore "Trusted Sender" status. While the DMARC skip wasn't a fail in the sense that it introduces any spam weight, it triggered Smartermail to use the spam weight allocated by Message Sniffer. We do this to add some amount of security to the Trusted Senders feature: we'll let all their mail through, as long as we can be extremely confident that they are who they say the are. The key to this type of identity verification is currently DMARC, so that's the one thing we require to pass for Trusted Senders.
If you'd prefer to bypass the DMARC check AND spam check, you'll want to use the "Allow users [...] unverified trusted senders" feature at Domains > [Domain] > General, although it's not really recommended".
Linda Pagillo
Mail's Best Friend
Email: linda.pagillo@mailsbestfriend.com
Web: www.mailsbestfriend.com
Authorized SmarterTools Reseller
Authorized Message Sniffer Reseller