| There are several methods to help you weed out spam in Pegasus mail.
The descriptions below are intended to get you started. Excellent help pages are available in Pegasus itself.
Note: Many different actions are available for you to specify when one of
your filters is triggered. I strongly advise you not to select the "delete"
action unless you are extraordinarily convinced your filters are infallible!
The best course is to redirect or otherwise tag these messages to help you
refine your filters. The types of filters are rules,
lists, and tests. |
| Using Filtering Rules |
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| Select the options shown above to get to the rule definitions
window. |
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Click on Add rule to create a new rule. |
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A wide variety of rule types are available. For this
example, we'll choose Headers. |
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This rule says that if "byu.edu" appears in the From
or Sender fields in the header, we will skip the next rule. |
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Back on the list of rules, our new rule shows up at the
bottom. Rules are executed in the order they appear in this list. The rule I
want to skip if "byu.edu" is in the header is the List scan rule. I
can move rules up and down in the list by using the arrows at the right end
of the tool bar. |
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Now the header will be checked for "byu.edu" before the List scan
rule and if it is found, the List scan rule will not be executed.
Filtering on lists is covered below. The reason I've added this rule here
is that I've found that the addresses containing "byu.edu" are not always
filtered correctly in the list.
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| Using Lists to Filter Messages The most common
procedure for filtering on lists is to define "white lists" and "black
lists." When these lists are activated, mail will be flagged if the sender
is not on the white list or if the sender is on the black list. What actions
are taken is determined by you. See the section above for an example using a
white list.
These lists are just text files containing email addresses so you can
manually type in addresses, copy addresses from another mailing list, or add
individual users from the new mail list. Note: When you are just getting
started, you will have bunches of messages that will be tagged. As you add
these addresses to your lists, the volume of tagged messages will quickly
decline. |
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One way to add addresses to your white or black lists is via
Content control. |
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On the Exceptions tab, you can edit the contents of
your white and black lists. A basic list file should already be available in
your PMAIL directory or you can create a new one. You should review the help
for more details on creating and maintaining these lists. |
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In my mail filtering rules above, I specified that mail from
folks not in my white list should be colored rose. Here's how they look in
my new mail folder. Notice the 2 messages from Michael Kennard. When the
first message (the one at the bottom) was received, the address was not in
my white list, so the message was colored. I added his address and his next
message was not tagged. |
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To add a user to the list, right click the message and
select Add sender to mail list. |
|
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One way to add addresses to your white or black lists is via
Content control. |
|
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On the Exceptions tab, you can edit the contents of
your white and black lists. A basic list file should already be available in
your PMAIL directory or you can create a new one. You should review the help
for more details on creating and maintaining these lists. |
|
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In my mail filtering rules above, I specified that mail from
folks not in my white list should be colored rose. Here's how they look in
my new mail folder. Notice the 2 messages from Michael Kennard. When the
first message (the one at the bottom) was received, the address was not in
my white list, so the message was colored. I added his address and his next
message was not tagged. |
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To add a user to the list, right click the message and
select Add sender to mail list. |
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Now click on the list you want the sender's address added to
and click Select. |
| Using Message Tests to Filter Messages: You can define
all sorts of specific message tests to weed out potential spam. The
description below is very abbreviated. You should refer to the excellent
help files for more detailed information on setting up these tests. |
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To access the message test file, open the Content Control
window. |
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On the message tab, edit the "spambust.dat" file. There
should be one in your Pmail directory. If not, you can copy one from the Z
drive. Warning: The default file contains many predefined conditions. Some
of the words in the file are quite offensive, but then those are the ones we
want to get rid of. |
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This is an example of what is in the spambust file. Each
time a condition is true, it is assigned a "weight" (specified by you). At a
certain threshold (default = 50), a predefined action is taken on the
message. (See below.) When you finish editing the file, be sure to check
the syntax. If there is an error in syntax, no filtering will be done. |
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On the Actions tab of the Content Control
window, you can specify the action to be taken when the weight assigned to a
message reaches the threshold. You have several options, including the one
shown here - to move the message out of your New Mail folder and into
another folder (SPAM, in this example). |
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Here are some of the actions you can define. For each type
of action, you can set certain parameters. For example, we'll choose to set
the message's color here. |
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Now clicking on Set brings up a window that allows us
to select the color we want to use to highlight potential spam. |