Spam Filtering

Your Email Settings

SpamAssassin is an automated email filtering system that attempts to identify spam messages based on the content of the email’s headers and body.

You can configure SpamAssassin from within the cPanel. In the Mail section, click on the ‘SpamAssassin’ link.

Turn on filtering by click on ‘Enable SpamAssassin‘ at the top of the page.  It will show a results page. Return to SpamAssassin by clicking on the ‘Go Back’ link.

At first you won’t know if SpamAssassin is going to tag legitimate mail as spam, so it’s best to disable the automatic deletion option. Click on the ‘Disable Auto-Delete Spam‘ button. It will show some details on a new page with a ‘Go Back‘ link. Click on the link.  In the section on Filters to the left of where the ‘Auto Delete’ button is, you’ll be tempted to set the score number here. If you do, it will re-enable the auto-deletion of spam. Instead, ignore this area completely and click on the ‘Configure SpamAssassin‘ button.

The most important option on this page is ‘Required Score‘.  We recommend a setting of 5.5, which is what was used on our previous server and worked well.

The mail server will append “*** SPAM ***” to the subject of any mail it considers to be spam. We suggest trying this out for awhile and adjust the required score if you need to. Once it’s got a good score value that works for you, you can then enable the auto-delete option.

Two other options in the SpamAssassin Configuration page are Blacklist and Whitelist. These areas allow you to automatically block (blacklist) or accept (whitelist) Emails from a particular Email address or domain name.

You can block/accept an entire domain by using a wildcard. Here’s an example:

*@SOMEDOMAIN.com

Once you’re done making changes on the SpamAssassin configuration page, click on the Save button. This updates your settings immediately.

In your mail client, set up a filter to catch any of the emails with a subject of “*** SPAM ***”so that it will move these messages into a separate folder, making it easier for you quickly review that there aren’t any legitimate messages and then you can delete the lot all at once.

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