That seems to be consistent with what I have observed.  Unfortunately, Policy actions are rather limited.  The available "Forward to another user" is what seems to have caused trouble to me (I have just had to deal with deleting 4500 messages as a result of a mail loop).  Mercury has taken a while to clear the queue!  I must obviously be very careful when using the Policy Forward action.

Thank you 

Gordon

If I have two Policy tasks, either of which can cause the current message to be deleted.  What happens if the first task deletes the message?  Does deletion wait until all tasks have been executed, i.e. initially only flagged for deletion but not deleted until the end of the Policy process, or does deletion take place straight away?  If the latter, is the second task executed on what would be a non-existent message?

It may be better to have only one Policy task when the result could be message deletion, but for the purpose of testing, it is more convenient to have two.

Any advice about this?

Thank you

Gordon

No direct answer to your question, but I used to run with 4 or 5 separate tasks, any of which could delete the message, and never had a problem.

Thanks Paul.  That a good sign anyway.

Gordon

I have now implemented post-filtering black-list testing through a Policy.  I have one remaining concern.  If I forward a message to another user as a result of a BL Policy trigger, does this cause the message to re-enter the mail queue and be subjected to content control, filtering and a Policy again.  I see a possible looping problem here.  Although, I eventually will be deleting messages that trigger the BL Policy, for testing, I want to forward it to another user, i.e. a "black-list" account.  Hence my concern about looping problems.

Thank you

Gordon

This is what Mercury help says about forwarding a message that triggers a policy:

 2: Forward the message to another address  enter the address to which the message should be forwarded in the "parameter" field. Mercury will attach the suspect message to a new message addressed to the address you supply, and will include any result text provided by your policy task in the body of the message.

The resulting message will presumably be put into the queue, but any tests on headers will then be performed on the new message, not the attached original message.

/Rolf 

Rolf - Yes, I noted what the Help says and this is why I feared that the message, with a new local header, would go into the queue and be reprocessed.  The trigger that I generate, depends on checking for the earliest X-Originating-IP.  This will not change wit the forwarded message, as I am not distinguishing between header and body in the script that I am using, external to Mercury.

I currently have looping occuring (but it doesn't start for several hours) and this happens when the triggering condition is not met.  In this case, the message should not be being forwarded to but simply exit from processing.  I am suspecting an error in my script, but I haven't found it yet.  However, I am also wondering whether messges that are moved to other users by Global Filtering are also going back into the mail queue, resulting in BL Policy being appled after exiting from Global Filtering.  I need to think more about this!

Thank you

Gordon

I believe that copy and move actions in filtering rules are performed directly by Mercury core (without putting any new files in queue). Forward actions in filters will create a new message, though.

/Rolf