SPAM MANAGEMENT
Recently we had a new client who manages their own hosting come to us complaining that they were losing emails and emails were going to the wrong place and they were constantly making whitelist or blacklist filters to try to solve the problems and asking if they should change hosts.
After a fairly quick look the it became evident that the host was not the problem. How they were identifying and handling mail, sorting spam, was the problem.
Let’s take a look at how most hosts identify and sort spam and hopefully provide some insights into how you can tweak your spam settings if you are having troubles and are hosting your own site.
HOW SPAM IS HANDLED
In the backend of your hosting account spam is handled under “Spam Filter.” (cPanel >> Email >> Spam Filter) Almost all hosting companies use “Apache SpamAssassin™,” a computer program that uses a variety of techniques, most of which are way too complex for mere mortals like me to understand.
Luckily the controls we need to interact with to sort and manage potential spam emails are very simple. The program rates the suspected spammieness of your incoming email on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is good and 10 is the worst spam and then you just need to select the threshold for it be called spam. The default setting is 5.
• Score 1: Aggressive – This will mark many legitimate emails as spam.
• Score 5: Default.
• Score 10: Passive. Will only catch very obvious spam.
Spam Assassin then adds ***SPAM*** to the email that meets or exceeds the score you’ve set.
The only other setting you realistically could or should interact with is whether you turn “automatically delete new spam” on or not. Though many hosts suggest you move spam to a spam mailbox instead of enabling this feature so you don’t accidentally delete good email messages.
If you decide to enable the auto delete function I would suggest setting it much higher, 7 or 8, to protect from accidentally deleting “good” emails.
Spam filter settings. I have set my Spam threshold to 4 in this example.
MOVING SPAM
The best way to make sure all of the mail marked as spam doesn’t stay in your inbox is to setup an email filter to move it. (cPanel >> Email >> Email Filters)
There are a couple pre-made shortcuts for making Spam Assassin filters which makes it fairly easy to setup.
Shortcuts to make moving spam where you want it easier.
MY FILTERS
This is how I’ve used these shortcuts to sort email marked as spam in one of my mailboxes.
The first filter moves email with a spam score equal to or above the spam threshold to my spam folder. (My spam filter threshold is set to 4, slightly stricter than the default.)
The second filter takes email with a Spam score of 7 (definitely spam) and above and deletes it. I don’t normally bother with the delete filter, preferring just to check and manually delete my spam occasionally but this setting is pretty safe to get the worst spam out of the way making monitoring my spam folder a bit easier.
I also could have also just set Spam Assassin’s delete threshold to 7 to achieve this. You have options.
Email filter moving messages marked as spam to spam mailbox.
Global email filter deleting all messages with a spam score of 7 or more.
And that’s my short do-it-yourself guide to managing spam. Of course, if you’d like we’d be happy to help you, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Thank you.
