Spam affects us all if you have an email address, chances are, you've gotten spam.
Our systems employ SpamAssassin to help curb spam, the problem is most people don't use it.
To make the most of SpamAssassin login to your Direct Admin control panel, make sure you are at the User Level (click "User Level" on the right side of the browser).
Click "SpamAssassin Setup" under E-Mail Management
Here is how we recommend you get the most out of SpamAssassin's options:
1. At first, set it to "Inbox" until you're pretty sure the settings aren't blocking real wanted email. When you feel that you can "trust" it you can set this to Delete but use that option at your own risk. You can also set this to use the "Spam Folder" but you then MUST use an IMAP based mail client and you need to actually LOOK at the Spam folder once in a while, else you are effectively "blocking" the email since you never will see it otherwise if it's tagged as spam.
2. Set a Custom Threshold, start with 2.5.
3. Set it to block all spam higher than 8 (even lower like 4 or 5 will probably be quite safe here or you can just leave it at 15).
4. Click the Yes, set the subject to the following: ****SPAM**** (feel free to change that to something less obnoxious like [SPAM]).
5. Leave Use Attachments as it is.
6. Don't bother with the Email Blacklist unless there is a particular email address that does send you regular messages you don't want. Spam rarely shows up from the same email twice, unless it's your OWN email address (forged in the header of course)
If someone you know is apt to send you very "spam like" emails you can whitelist them here.
7. SAVE and now comes the hard part.
8. As time goes on (weeks and days, not hours) if you see an email come into your inbox that is SPAM (or vice versa, good email marked as spam) and it is not marked SPAM you want to find out why, to do that, look at the "HEADER" of the email, this is the (usually) hidden to you portion of a raw email that shows all sorts of things, so depending on your mail client, "view all headers" for the email you're concerned with.
Look for some lines something like this:
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (2008-06-10) on mail.yourdomein.ca.
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.6 required=2.5 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham
version=3.2.5
Look at the score= if you see a few spam that is scoring "just below" your threshold, then go back into the setup for SpamAssassin and bump it a little lower, if you see 2 or 3 spam all scoring 2.2 or 2.3 then set your threshold to 2.2 and see if that's better. Do the opposite if good email shows up tagged as spam, you may need to bump the threshold up some, likely resulting in more spam being missed.
- More details about configuring SpamAssassin can be found at http://spamassassin.apache.org/.
SpamAssassin, Spam, Filters, email
