A guide to Content Control in
Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32.

This document is last updated 31-December-2003.

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The "Exceptions" Page

Use this page to create Blacklists, which identify senders whose mail should always be regarded as unacceptable, and Whitelists, which identify senders from whom you always want to accept mail. For Pegasus Mail users, Blacklists and Whitelists are normally just regular Pegasus Mail distribution lists, which means that you can easily manipulate them using filtering rules, and with the right-click options "Add sender to mailing list" and "Remove sender from mailing list" while you are reading a message or browsing the contents of a folder. It is also possible to share system-wide Blacklists and Whitelists by putting them in a shared directory then entering the path to that directory in this window.

Blacklist file
Enter in this field the name of a file in which Mercury should check for addresses and domains from which mail should always be regarded as unacceptable. The file need not exist already. Once you have entered the filename, you can edit the file by clicking the edit button next to the field. Within the blacklist file, you can use asterisks as wildcard characters to match entire domains or parts of domains: so, if you want to block all users from the domain spam.com, you would enter *@spam.com. Similarly, to block all mail from any user on any machine within the spam.com domain group, you would enter *@*.spam.com.

Whitelist file
Enter in this field the name of a file in which Mercury should check for addresses and domains from which mail should never be regarded as unacceptable. The file need not exist already. Once you have entered the filename, you can edit the file by clicking the edit button next to the field. You can use the same type of wildcard operations described for the blacklist file within the whitelist.

Which headers are examined?

The blacklist and whitelist examine the From:. Reply-to:. and Return-path headers. The "sender" header is NOT examined, because it's hardly ever used properly.

 
Next: The "Message Tests" Page