Pegasus Mail & Mercury

I have been using POP3 filter rules successfully for some time. Basically all rules were about "if Subject: contains a given expression, then delete on server", "if To: contains a defined address, then delete on server", etc. This worked very well until a while ago. Lately messages that should have been deleted on the server started to slip through. For example, one of the rules I defined is that if the subject lines contains the expression "from an unknown number" (to block fax spam that is forwarded to my email account), the message should be deleted on the server. All fax spam comes through, though. Similarly, I tried to block spam to my website account info@mysite.nl, by defining a rule all if the To: line contains info@mysite.nl, those messages should be deleted on the server. Also this rule appears ineffective. Even after defining a similar rule focussing on <info@mysite.nl>. I created my rule set again from zero, but without result. Funny enough it happens on both my desktop computer and on my notebook, although I must admit that I regularly interchange the data directory between the two of them. One of the impressions Ihave is that it might have started when I created a series of extra rules when there were already some ten rules defined. 

Does anyone have experience with this, and what would be a solution?

Hilbrand 

Perhaps you could try the following:

(1) Check preceeding rules for errors. Pegasus seems to skip the rest of the rule set if a rule is malformed. This is most likely to happen if you edit the rule file directly, but I think it is possible to introduce such errors using the built-in rule editor too.

(2) If you have rules with "Download" action then check if any of them might match messages that should be deleted. From what I think I know, Pegasus will do the actual download or deletion after exiting from the rule set - not while still running the message tests. Unexpected things might happen if rules with opposing actions match.

(3) Check any rules with "Goto Label", "Exit this rule set", etc actions so you don't accidentally bypass the "Delete" actions.

(4) If everything else fails, then build a new rule set with just one of the "Delete rules". Attach it to your POP3 definition and verify that it works. Finally add one rule at a time, all the while making sure that rules still work.

HTH

Erik