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

Pegasus Mail has two features that deal with spam:

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• Content control. Content control is a filter based anti spam feature.

• Spamhalter. Spamhalter, a Bayesian Spam Filter

Both work on incoming new messages and have their own way of handling them, except when the senders address is on the Global Whitelist.

Spamhalter vs Content Control

Spamhalter is designed as a complement to Pegasus Mail's other spam-control mechanism, Content Control. Spamhalter and Content Control approach the issue of spam from different directions, and each has specific strengths and weaknesses. Spamhalter requires very little ongoing maintenance, and has a very high detection ratio for spam: Content Control, on the other hand, requires more maintenance, but allows you to use very specific tests to detect messages, and can be used for general-purpose filtering on content. A combination of the two mechanisms can give the best possible results for managing your mail based on its content.

Using Spamhalter and Content Control together

Detecting spam is an inexact science, and no one tool is ever going to be able to detect everything correctly. Spamhalter's Bayesian model is a perfect complement to Pegasus Mail's built-in rule-based Content Control system: each has strengths and weaknesses, and combining them can produce extremely high rates of spam detection. It is your choice whether to use Spamhalter, Content Control, or both, but any combination of the two systems is completely valid. For beginning users, though, Spamhalter typically offers a much lower-maintenance spam filtering solution on its own than Content Control.

How are they related to each other:

Pegasus Mail works through the anti-spam / filterrule features in the following order:

1. POP3 serverside filtering rules (if any)
2. Global whitelist (if any)
3. Spamhalter (if the sender is not on the global whitelist and spamhalter is activated)
4. Content control sets in order of occurrence including each black/whitelist (if the sender is not on the global whitelist and content control is activated)
5. New Mail filter rules (if any)