Fighting Spam: SpamAssassin Tutorial for Beginners

Dealing with spam has been an ongoing issue since the early days of email communications. While there are several client-side solutions, preventing spam from reaching your mailbox can add another level of security.

SpamAssassin is of the most popular solution among free anti-spam softwares. If your web hosting company uses cPanel, then chances are you have access to it. If not, well then… errr… too bad for you.

Enabling SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a server-side anti-spam which is disabled by default. Here’s how to enable it :

1. Use your web browser to access cPanel on your web hosting account. This is usually located at http://[your-website]/cpanel
2. Click the SpamAssassin icon.
3. Click the Enable SpamAssassin button.

SpamAssassin Threshold Level

When an email is being received by your mail server, it goes through SpamAssassin before being delivered to your inbox. There are a set of rules for identifying spam and scores are associated with those rules. An overall score is then attributed to the message. The higher the score, the most likely the message is spam. If the score is higher than the threshold score, the email will then be marked as spam.

By default, SpamAssassin’s threshold score is set at 5. If you notice that legitimate mail (also known as HAM) are being filtered out, try to increase the threshold score a little bit.

How to Handle Spam?

No anti-spam solution is perfect and sometime legitimate emails can be tagged as spam by mistake. Therefore, instead of deleting spam mail systematically, you can configure SpamAssassin to deliver these messages to a separate folder which you’ll have to empty manually. This way you can always recover an email that’s been filtered out by error.

Advanced SpamAssassin Configuration

SpamAssassin also allows you to automatically mark messages as spam based on the sender’s address or its domain name. For instance, you could block messages from [email protected] or you could block all incoming messages from the yahoo.com domain by using a wildcard (*@yahoo.com).

The same things goes for whitelisting except that you automatically allow all incoming mail from a particular set of addresses or domains to be delivered to your inbox, no matter if it seems like spam or not.

SpamAssassin has a lot more to offer than what you see in cPanel though. Unfortunately you can only benefit from these additional features if you’re using a dedicated server.