UNH IT: WebMail Blacklist Maintenance

If you receive persistent annoying mail from the same address, you might want to consider adding that address to your WebMail Blacklist. Incoming mail from addresses on your Blacklist will be automatically thrown away instead of delivered to your Inbox.

This page describes how to maintain your WebMail Blacklist. First, some guidelines:

Be careful. Incoming mail from blacklisted addresses is silently deleted without any indication to you. If you mistakenly get a non-annoying person's address in your Blacklist, you won't get any further mail from that person until it's removed.
Only blacklist persistent addresses. Most spammers only use a sending address once. If you blacklist every spam address you see, you'll wind up with a bunch of useless entries in your blacklist. If you're bedeviled by spam, make sure you've enabled the CIS Unix Spam Filter before you start blacklisting willy-nilly.
Try unsubscribing. Most reputable e-mailers will honor a request to be removed from their mailing list. All "bulk" messages should contain instructions on how to do that.

That said, however…

Blacklisting an address is very easy. There are a couple ways to do it:

In the folder list display, you can click the checkbox next to (one or more) messages, then click 'Blacklist' to add the corresponding sender addresses to your Blacklist.

In the example, we're about to blacklist the addresses used by Adam Hicks and Classmates.com. Clicking on 'Blacklist' will display confirming messages that the addresses have been added; the messages will also be deleted from the folder.
You can also blacklist the sender of a message from the message-viewing window by clicking the 'Blacklist' link:

Again, clicking 'Blacklist' will display confirming messages and delete the message from the folder.

You may find it necessary to view, add, delete, or change the addresses in your Blacklist. Here's how to do that:

On the left-side menu, click the plus-sign-in-a-box icon next to the 'Mail' menu item, if necessary, to display its subitems.
Click the 'Filters' icon under 'Mail'.
This should display the 'Existing Rules' page:

Click on 'Blacklist' or the editing icon on the left.
You should see a text entry area containing the addresses on your Blacklist.

Use your normal text editing skills to make sure the list contains the addresses (and only the addresses) from which you don't want to receive mail.

(Note that, although the default behavior for the Blacklist is to delete incoming messages completely, there's also an option to direct the messages to a different mail folder.)

Click 'Save' when done.

Page Maintenance:

Paul A. Sand <pas@unh.edu>

Last modified: 2012-05-07 8:51 AM EDT
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