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Information on Spam
Assassin and Email Filters available to you as part of your hosting services
Several clients have asked us recently about
Anti-spam tools available
within your hosting cpanel so as follows here is some information on Spam
Assassin and Email Filters available to you as part of your hosting services
Spam assasin instructions
Follow the below instructions to remove spam weekly once you have enabled
spam assassin within your hosting cpanel under the mail icon. Make sure you
also enable the spam box
Spam Assassin is a mail filter installed on a mail server used to identify
spam. It checks for spam using a large number of pre-set rules that check
the header, body, and sender of all e-mail messages sent to your domain
mailbox. For more information about Spam Assassin, refer to the following
links:
* Spam Assassin - Spam Assassin web site.
http://spamassassin.taint.org/index.html
* Spam Assassin rules - A list of all the rules that Spam Assassin currently
uses.
http://spamassassin.taint.org/tests.html
Also refer to E-mail Filtering for more information about spam and setting
up filters.
To enable Spam Assassin:
1. Click on the Spam Assassin link in the Mail area.
2. Click on the Enable Spam Assassin button.
Topics:
Configuring Spam Assassin
http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cp/ConfiguringSpamAssassin.htm
Enabling or disabling the Spam Box
http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cp/SpamBox.htm
Disabling Spam Assassin
http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cp/disablingSpamAssassin.htm
To remove spam manually enter your webmail
Login i.e
http://www.yourdomain.com.au/webmail
main user name and password as supplied with original hosting sign-up email
once in select Horde program and then enter as directed
Click on inbox and then up in right hand corner you will see a drop down
menu which lists all email accounts for your domain. Select the spam box and
this will list all emails tagged as spam. You can read through to see if any
legitimate emails have been spam tagged incorrectly. To delete them just
select all in the left hand side of the program and then delete. Note you
will have to hit purge deleted emails which is on the right hand side. If
you have several 100 spam emails in the spam box this could take some time
as each page only lists 20 emails at a time so another way is to do it using
SSH protocol and a command line prompt as follows
SSH /telnet protocol
Your SSH /telnet account is: yourdomain.com.au or just use your ip address
as
supplied with your hosting
Login and username also as supplied
For added security we have disabled normal telnet and use the SSH protocol
with a free client like Putty which can be downloaded here
http://putty.gyron.net which is
the recommended secure way to go. You also
have access to ssh via your cpanel account but we recommend using Putty as
above.
Once you are in use the following command line prompt
rm /home/main_usr/mail/yourdomain.com.au/mail_box_usr/spam
i.e., if main user was sales and the email account with the spam was
sales@yourdomain.com.au the command line prompt would be as follows
rm /home/sales/mail/yourdomain.com.au/sales/spam
This will remove all email messages tagged as spam in the spam box
Email Filtering instructions
You can block an e-mail using spam filters. There are many definitions of
spam, but one particularly useful one is the following:
Spam is the electronic version of junk mail, and has been around since the
Internet was created. E-mail filters are a way of filtering your e-mail to
remove unwanted mail based on a variety of criteria. You can block any sort
of e-mail, not just mail of a commercial nature. Blocked mail can be deleted
automatically or sent to another e-mail address or script. These filters are
quite flexible - some examples are provided after the instruction on how to
add a spam filter below. All filters are cumulative.
Useful spam info:
* Six simple things you can do to prevent spam
http://www.spamrecycle.com/antispamthings.htm
* Alternate definition of spam
http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml
* Usenet definition of spam
http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html#2.1
Also refer to Spam Assassin above for another approach to dealing with spam.
To add an e-mail filter:
1. Click on the E-mail Filtering link in the Mail area of your hosting
cpanel
2. Click on the Add Filter link.
3. Click on the required header field in the first drop-down list. These are
the various fields in any e-mail message.
4. Click on the required filter action in the second drop-down list. This
action will act on the text entered in the third field.
o equals - match the text exactly (whole words only). "Credit" will block
"Credit".
o matches regex - matches the text based on regular expression (regex)
rules. Regular expressions are a powerful but complex area. You do not need
to use regular expression filters for most circumstances. Refer to these two
good introductory tutorials - Using Regular Expressions
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/helpsheets/regex.html and Learning
to Use
Regular Expressions
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/regular_expressions.html -
for more
information.
o contains - match the specified text in any circumstance. "porn" will block
"porn" and "pornography".
o begins with - match the specified text when it is the beginning of a word.
"porn" will block "porn" and "pornography" but not "teenporn".
5. Enter the filter text in the third field. This text is case sensitive.
6. Enter the destination for the filtered e-mail in the Destination field.
There are three separate types of destination:
o Destroy the e-mail - Enter Discard in the field.
o Redirect to another address - Enter the e-mail address to which to
redirect the e-mail.
o Redirect to a script - Enter the full script path on the machine that
hosts your web site.
7. Click on the Activate button.
Example:
* To redirect all e-mail from "john@paradise.net", enter: From, equals,
john@paradise.net, david@corse.org.nz
* To delete all e-mail from paradise.net, enter: From, contains,
paradise.net, Discard
* To delete all references to pornography, enter: Any Header, contains,
porn, Discard
* To discard all e-mail that Spam Assassin has marked as spam, enter:
SpamAssassin Spam Header, begins with, yes, Discard
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