Dealing with spam
From HostBaby Wiki
IMPORTANT: Are these screen shots not looking like your Spam Assassin page? Try this related article.
Contents |
First off
Check out the Spam Prevention page for tips on preventing the spam from reaching you in the first place.
SpamAssassin Settings
You can access your SpamAssassin settings page by going to: http://www.yourdomain.com/spam or click "Edit SpamAssassin Settings" from your webmail login or Email Admin page. Login with the same username & password you use to check your mail.
Allowed/Denied Senders (1A/1B) in Image Below)
This section is your whitelist (1A) & blacklist (1B) for forcing SpamAssassin to treat mails from certain senders as never spam or always spam. It comes in handy if you get any false positives (more on this below) or wish to stop seeing emails from a certain sender.
The names are misleading in that the "denied" addresses aren't actually denied by our server (aka bounce back), they're actually just always tagged as ****SPAM**** by SpamAssassin.
Required Score (2 in Image Below)
SpamAssassin works by examining every incoming email and assigning that mail a score based on how likely it thinks the mail is indeed spam. It uses a very large set of rules and tests to accomplish this. Each individual rule/test has it's own specific positive or negative numeric score value. The higher the score a mail receives, the more likely it's spam (and conversely, the lower the score, the less likely it's spam.. many obviously non-spam personal emails will often have a negative score value). You can actually see the score each of your mails receives by viewing the full headers of that mail using the webmail or your email program (look for the "X-Spam-Status:" header).
Your Required Score setting basically tells SpamAssassin how strict it should be in examining your emails. It's the "cut off point" where you decide emails scoring above this number are spam and numbers scoring below it are not spam. The lower the number, the more strict it will be (and the more "false positives" you will receive).
By default, the Required Score is 7.2. The SpamAssassin software ships with it's default at 5, but we've found this to sometimes be too strict for some people. Many of our users have gone as low as 4 or even 3 without too much of a problem.
False positives
A "false positive" here means any real email tagged as ****SPAM**** by our server. This can happen a lot if you set your Required Score setting too low.
We recommend you don't completely ignore every ****SPAM****-tagged email you receive. Once you get the hang of it, it's often very easy to know without opening the mail whether or not it's really spam (there is however no risk in simply opening the mail to double-check).
If you do find a real email tagged as spam, two things:
- You can still read/reply/forward to the original email by opening the attachment on the ****SPAM****-tagged email.
- You should add the sender's email address to your "Allowed Senders" list on your SpamAssassin Settings page.. this will prevent any future mails from them from being tagged as SPAM.
Rewrite Subject Line (3 in Image Below)
You can change what is added to a subject line of an email when it is tagged as SPAM with this option. Simply change the field to whatever you'd like.
You can display the SPAM score right in your email subject if you wish. Simply set your "Subject Line Tag" setting to: ***SPAM(_SCORE(0)_)***. This puts the mail's score right in the Subject heading. You can then sort your SPAM folder by Subject to find the lowest-scoring mails and possible false positives.
Deliver to SPAM folder (4 in Image Below)
Enabling this setting is recommended for anyone using our webmail exclusively. It automatically delivers every SPAM-tagged email into the SPAM subfolder in your webmail, keeping them out of your INBOX and giving you a common place to skim for possible false positives.
Tip: you can set your webmail SPAM folder to auto-delete after a certain number of days by going to the webmail Options -> Folder Preferences -> set the Auto-Prune SPAM folder option to however many days worth of mail you wish to keep. (Note: auto-pruning only happens when you login to your webmail)
Additional Tip
- Use a real email program to check your mail instead of the webmail. A real mail program often gives you much more control in searching & filtering your emails. Thunderbird is a very good email program that comes with it's own built-in auto-learning junk filters (you tell it what is or isn't "Junk" and it learns over time and adjusts itself to your emails).
