This article describes how to create and manage blocklist and acceptlist rules through the Jellyfish spam filter. 


Jellyfish is a smart anti-spam filter with a spam management interface. The interface is available for Private Email and Shared Hosting users and right now it’s possible to create, edit, delete, turn on/off (by one and in bulk) blocklist & acceptlist rules and turn on/off the filtration.

The blocklist feature allows you to add individual rules for blocking specific emails, domains and subjects you don't want to receive in your inbox. As for acceptlist, think of it as an inverted blocklist. It allows you to accept some specific emails, domains and subjects in order to make sure you always receive them even if the filtration system could potentially flag such an email as spam after analyzing a number of factors.

To create a new rule, it is necessary to navigate to the Blocklist or Acceptlist tab and click Create a new rule button:



Once done, a pop-up window with the types of rules to the blocklist/acceptlist will appear. Below we will describe all these types of rules in detail.

• Email rule: if you need to restrict (add to the blocklist) or make sure to receive (add to the acceptlist) a specific email address, select the Email option.


NOTE: If you receive “The email address is not valid. Please enter again.”, double-check that the email address you entered is correct and make sure there are no invalid symbols or special characters.

It is possible to choose whether you want to apply a blocklist/acceptlist rule to all your mailboxes or to some particular ones only. Click "Selected mailbox only" to insert the particular mailbox(es) you want the rule to apply to.




• Domain rule: if you need to block or accept a specific domain (all mailboxes existing for it) the emails are coming from, select the Domain option. If you choose this option, it means that emails from all mailboxes existing for this specific domain will be blocked/accepted.
  
  



• Subject rule: If you want to block emails with certain subjects choose the Subject option.
  
  

Please note:

• If you create a new rule in conflict with an existing rule, the new rule will be prioritized. For example, you first create a blocklist rule to block all subjects containing ‘deals’. Then you create an acceptlist rule to accept all subjects containing ‘deals’. In this case, the acceptlist rule will be working (as it’s a new one here) and the blocklist one will not work.


• If you need to add two or more different subjects, domains or emails to your acceptlist/blocklist, please create several separate rules. For example, if you want to block subjects that contain such phrases as ‘Earn $’ and ‘Make money’, you will need to create two separate rules.

If you need to create a rule with multiple different types of conditions, you can do so by selecting the Advanced option. This is helpful, for example, for combining email and subject types if you don't want to receive specific subjects from some email address and not all emails from that email address.

More information on advanced rules creation can be checked here.



Settings option allows to disable and enable Jellyfish filtration in the Jellyfish interface. Keep in mind that not only the rules (blocklist and acceptlist ones) created by you will get disabled if you turn Jellyfish off, but the anti-spam filtration in general. As a result, you will receive all the emails sent to your email address, even spam ones.



NOTE: It’s not recommended to disable your anti-spam filtration since it makes your email account vulnerable to potential email risks.

When the filtration is disabled, you will see the following warning messages that suggest enabling the filtration:



NOTE: Once filtration is disabled, it is not possible to create, add or edit blocklist/acceptlist rules. It is needed to enable filtration in order to do that.




That's it!