Knowledgebase

This article is for cPanel Accounts. Determine where your account is with this guide.

The best tool for reducing how much spam is delivered to an e-mail account is SpamAssassin. There is a dedicated tool for this in the Email section of cPanel. You will first need to Enable it with the button near the top.

Once enabled, cPanel should tell you as much so you can select "Go Back" to review other settings that will now be available for you to modify.

Since we do not know if SpamAssassin will tag legitimate e-mail as spam or not, it is recommended that you disable automatic deletion. Click on the "Disable Auto-Delete Spam" button to do that. You can re-enable this setting later when you are sure that SpamAssassin will only be deleting mail that you do not want.

SpamAssassin determines if an e-mail is spam or not by assigning it a score based on various criteria such as keywords, phrases, origin domain, and the mail server it was sent from. If the score is high enough the message will be tagged as spam.

Click on the "Configure SpamAssassin" button at the bottom. From this location you are able to set various settings.

Required Score sets the stringency of the SpamAssassin filter. The number you set is the required score that SpamAssassin will use to tag spam. Anything of that score and higher will be flagged. The lower the number, the more likely it is to catch legitimate e-mail. The higher the score, the more lenient it will be and the more spam is likely to be delivered to the inbox.

With Auto-Deletion disabled, the recommend starting score is 3 or 4.
When you receive an e-mail that SpamAssassin gives a score at the same level or higher than your setting, the subject line will be injected with "***SPAM***" so you can easily see when it has been flagged.

Once you have set the score, try it out for a while and adjust it as needed. As you come to settle on the correct score for your needs, you may want to enabled the auto-deletion setting [if you are sure] so that these flagged messages never make it to your inbox.

Blacklist From is a setting that allows you to automatically block e-mails from a particular e-mail address or an entire domain name. If you want to block an entire domain [say google.com, though we don't recommend that of course], set it up as a wildcard which looks like "*@google.com" minus the quotes.

Whitelist From is a tool that ensures you always receive messages from a particular e-mail address or domain name. This works in the same way that the Blacklist option is formatted.

Once you are done configuring all of your settings, click on the Save button and the settings will be applied instantly!