Portmaster is all about protecting your privacy. This also means that it may block something that you want to allow. Here’s how you do it:
¶ 1. Find the blocked connection in the Network Monitor
Before we can try to fix anything, we need to find the connection that is blocked in the Network Monitor. To do this, open the Portmaster App, and open the Network Monitor.
You can go about this in two ways, look for the app or for the connection.
I you know the app, go and find the application that you are having trouble with. Sometimes applications are split into multiple sub-parts, so you might need to click around. If you see an application that has at least a little bit of a gray bar, it means that at least one connection is blocked:
If you have found the application, open it and search for the blocked connection, which are marked with a red dot:
Alternatively you can filter for all blocked connections by putting allowed:false into the search bar.
If you found a connection that was blocked and looks like the one that you’d rather allow, continue to the next step:
¶ 2. Find out why it is blocked
To get more information about the blocked connection, click on it to open the details:
In addition to many other details (also depending on your User Interface Mode), you can see “Applied Setting” in the bottom left of this section. This tells you which setting was responsible for blocking this connection.
¶ 3. Allow the connection
In order to allow this connection, you now have two options:
- Add an exception for this connection (recommended), or
- Change the responsible setting
¶ 3.1. Add an exception for this connection
In order to add an exception for this domain, just press the button at the bottom left of the connection section:
If you then go to the settings of the application, you will see that a new rule was added:
If the “Allow Domain” or “Allow IP” button is disabled, this means that an exception is not possible and that you must change the responsible setting:
¶ 3.2. Change the responsible setting
Before you change the setting, you must decide whether you want to change the settings for this app only (recommended) or globally for all apps (which don’t have this setting configured differently).
Pressing the corresponding button will take you to the responsible setting:
How to change the setting heavily depends on the setting itself, so the best way to go forward is to read the description by clicking on the (i) icon:
Generally, we try to make all settings provide more protection by turning them “on”, so in most cases turning off a setting will allow the connection.
In case there are multiple settings that block a connection, you might need to repeat this process.
Search terms:
- unblock
- un-block