This opens the Blocklist window. The blocklist consists of a list of rules. If a message matches one or more rules on the blocklist, SpamSieve will predict that it is spam. Each row in the blocklist window represents one rule. The meanings of the columns are as follows:
If this is checked, the rule is enabled. Disabled rules do not block any messages, but they are useful because they prevent SpamSieve from re-learning a rule that you don’t want.
For example, say that you get forged spam messages from your own address. When you receive such a message, and tell SpamSieve that it’s spam, any rule on the whitelist with your address would be disabled. This will enable future such messages to be caught. If you later get a legitimate message from your own address and tell SpamSieve that it’s good, the whitelist rule will remain disabled. If you had previously deleted the rule instead of disabling it, telling SpamSieve that the message was good would create a new, enabled whitelist rule, which is probably not what you want.
When SpamSieve checks whether a message matches a rule, it compares the part of the message named by the Header column with the contents of the rule’s Text to Match column. The following are the message parts that may be used in the Header column:
The character set often indicates the language of the message. Many spam messages are sent using Asian or Cyrillic character sets, and SpamSieve is pre-configured to block these. The IANA maintains a list of character sets.
There are several different ways in which SpamSieve can compare the text in the message’s header to the rule’s text. In all cases, capitalization does not matter; lowercase letters are considered the same as their uppercase counterparts.
This is like Contains, except that the rule text is treated as a Perl-compatible regular expression. Regular expressions are a powerful way of specifying patterns of text, for instance: e-mail addresses that contain numbers before the @ sign or subjects that are longer than 30 characters. For example, a Matches Regex rule with the text:
^.*(?<!^sales|^support)@domain\.com$
would match all messages where the match field ends with @domain.com but is not sales@domain.com or support@domain.com. This can be used to block messages sent to fake addresses. And this regex:
(?-i)^(Re: )?[A-Z]{2,8}, [ a-z0-9'?!]*$
matches a common pattern of spam message subjects.
If the regular expression entered in the Text to Match column is invalid, SpamSieve will color it in red, and it will not match any messages.
You can edit a rule’s Header or Match Style by clicking in the corresponding column and selecting from the pop-up menu. To edit a rule’s Text to Match, double-click the text.
Training SpamSieve with a spam message adds its sender to the blocklist. You can delete a rule from the blocklist by selecting it and pressing Delete. Generally, there is little reason to delete rules; if you don’t like what a rule is doing, you should instead uncheck the rule to prevent SpamSieve from re-learning it. Also, SpamSieve is optimized such that having lots of rules does not reduce performance.
You can copy the selected rules to the clipboard or drag and drop them into another application. You can type the first few letters of a rule’s Text to Match to quickly locate that rule, or use the search field in the toolbar to focus on a group of related rules.