WebHosting EMail Anti-Spam

Setting up anti-spam filtering

Setting up Spam filtering for your email hosted on Cpanel is easy and involves two pbasic steps. Enable Spam Assassin on Cpanel and set up rules for spam filtering on your email client on your local machine.

Enabling Spam Assassin on Cpanel
1. Log onto Cpanel by entering http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel. You will be prompted for a username and password.

2. Click on the 'Mail' icon in your CPanel. You will be taken to the Mail Manager Main Menu screen.

3. Click on the link 'Spam Assassin'.

4. Click on Enable Spam Assassin.

5. Once cPanel indicates the change was processed, click on Go_Back link to go back to Spam Assassin menu screen.

6. Click on Configure Spam Assassin. You will be taken to the Spam Assassin Configuration screen.

7. Go to the field that asks you for the 'required_score'. This configuration set the number of hits required before a mail is considered spam. 5.0 is the default setting, and is quite aggressive; if you want the spam filtering to be less sensitive (basically letting more spam through) use a more conservative number, like 8.0 or 10.0. This number can be updated at any time so you can start with the default and change it later if you want to adjust the number of emails tagged as spam.

8. Go to the field that asks you to 'rewrite_header subject'. Type *** SPAM ***
in the empty text box. This text ** SPAM *** will be added to the 'Subject' line of mails that are considered spam.

8. Click on Save. You can now exit Cpanel.

Set up Spam filtering in your email client
First a note on spam filtering. Now that Cpanel knows to label spam emails as *** SPAM *** you need to set up the sorting of your incoming emails. There are two options on Cpanel for the server to handle the filtering 'adding a filter to discard emails' and setting up a 'spam box'. OpenAccess do NOT recommend using Cpanel for filtering the emails instead we recommend you handle the filtering on your local machine through your email client.

9. You do this by adding a rule to move all emails containing the subject *** SPAM *** to a separate folder. You will need to add a new folder in your inbox that you label Spam or Junk. Each email client is different so if you need help with setting up the rules go to the 'Help' link in your email client and seach for 'setting up rules'.

10. Remember to review emails tagged as spam in your spam or junk folder on a regular basis to catch any emails that could be legiimate. Again the number of emails that end up in the spam folder will be determined by the 'score' that you set when configuring Spam Assassin.

Lastly, another trick to avoid spam:

Default Address

Under the Mail Manager Main Menu there is a link to 'Deafult Email Address'.
When the mail server receives an email to an email address sent to your website that is not listed under Email accounts it will forward it to this default address. This can be set to one of your website's email accounts but we recommend setting these emails to fail.

It is common for spammers who do not always know your specific email accounts on the server to pick a random email account to send their spam to. By configuring this default address to ':fail: no such address here' these unrouted emails will be bounced back. Alternatively you can set it to ':blackhole:' to discard all incoming unrouted mail. OpenAccess recommends setting the default address to fail so that the email get bounced back rather than discarded/deleted. This means that anybody sending a legiitimate email to you with a typo in the email address they will get a bounce back and they will know to update the email address.

You can avoid a lot of spam emails by bouncing unrouted emails.