[ubuntu] New to Amavis-New

Good Day
I am fairly inexperienced with amavis and humbly request that someone assist me with some concise guidance in administering amavis-new on ubuntu 14. I have followed the well written guide below on how to install amavis-new, clam av and spamassassin on my ubuntu postfix server. the installation was easy and i have confirmed that mail is indeed passing through amavis. That that part went well, however.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixAmavisNew

What i am battling to find is an easy to understand guide on how to administer my newly installed spam filter. Many of the information in the forums and google points to a sql based configuration. I understand that the spamassassin libraries are just referenced and therefore no changes should be made on the spam assassin config.

I need some guidance on where and how i should do the following basic tasks

1. Whitelisting an email address or domain
2. Blacklisting and email address or domain
3. seeing what has been quarantined (i can do this by looking at the mail.log) but is there no better way?
4. Creating custom filters
   
   1. for certain content for instance a phrase or attachment in an email.

I understand that my questions are perhaps a bit broad but any assistance from a willing hand would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance
S