Artifacts from dependencies can be excluded by declaring an <exclusions> element inside a <dependency> But in this case it's needed to exclude an artifact inherited from a parent project. An excerpt of the POM under discussion follows:

<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>test</groupId>
  <artifactId>jruby</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <parent>
        <artifactId>base</artifactId>
        <groupId>es.uniovi.innova</groupId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
    </parent>

    <dependencies>      
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.liferay.portal</groupId>
            <artifactId>ALL-DEPS</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
            <type>pom</type>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</project>

base artifact, depends on javax.mail:mail-1.4.jar, and ALL-DEPS depends on another version of the same library. Due to the fact that mail.jar from ALL-DEPS exist on the execution environment, although not exported, collides with the mail.jar that exists on the parent, which is scoped as compile.

A solution could be to rid off mail.jar from the parent POM, but most of the projects that inherit base, need it (as is a transtive dependency for log4j). So What I would like to do is to simply exclude parent's library from the child project, as it could be done if base was a dependency and not the parent pom:

...
    <dependency>
        <artifactId>base</artifactId>
        <groupId>es.uniovi.innova</groupId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
        <type>pom<type>
        <exclusions>
          <exclusion>
             <groupId>javax.mail</groupId>
             <artifactId>mail</artifactId>
          </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
...