Overview
The MailEssentials Configuration UI does not provide for bulk updating of the Email Addresses or Domains that should be excluded from the Greylisting checks. The UI only allows for a manual update of the email addresses and domain which can only be done one at a time and can be tedious if updating many email addresses/domains.
This article describes the procedure to configure the Greylist exclusions email addresses in bulk i.e. Emails or domains which the Greylist filter should not process.
Solution
The bulk import process will typically be done when you have a batch of several email addresses to be excluded from the Greylisting process. If only excluding a few email addresses/domains, this can be more efficiently done using the configuration UI by navigating to GFI MailEssentials > Anti-Spam > Anti-Spam Filters > Greylist under the Email Exclusions tab.
There is currently no option to bulk import multiple email exclusions into the Greylist using the Configuration UI. The workaround is to modify the config.mdb database directly and import the desired email/domain entries into it by following the below steps:
- Stop all GFI Services. This can be done from the Windows Services manager (services.msc)
- Obtain a copy of the configuration database config.mdb from
..GFI\MailEssentials\Antispam\ - Open the configuration database using Microsoft Access and locate the greylisting_exclusions table:
- The table has 3 columns as shown above:
- id: This is an auto-incrementing number (AutoNumber)
- Type: Can either be 1 or 2, for specifying if the exclusion applies to senders represented by 1 (equivalent to selecting From
on the UI) or to the local recipients represented by 2 (equivalent to selecting To 
on the UI). - String: full email address; or emails from an entire domain (e.g: trusteddomain.com, *@trusteddomain.com)
- Format the bulk data (representing email addresses to be excluded from Greylisting) for Import to conform to the above schema. The supported formats for import are shown in the screenshot below. Do not include the id column in your data as this is auto-generated:
- Import the data and save the config.mdb database
- Rename the original config.mdb file to config.old.
- Copy the modified config.mdb file into the same location.
- Restart all the GFI MailEssentials services stopped in step 1.
Confirmation
Log on to the MailEssentials Configuration UI and navigate to GFI MailEssentials > Anti-Spam > Anti-Spam Filters > Greylist under the Email Exclusions tab.
The bulk imported email addresses/domains should be visible under the Email list section as shown below:
