cPanel Flash Tutorial: How to configure SpamAssassin?

This cPanel Flash Tutorial will show you how to configure "Spamassassin" in cPanel. Spamassassin is a free software that comes with all cPanel / WHM installations. It is used to filter incoming email messages on a domain. Using cPanel a user can activate , deactivate or configure filtering options for Spamassassin. There also exists a Spamassassin Spam Box that can be enabled and used to collect / view all emails that Spamassassin marks as spam. Using SpamAssassin and email filtering option of cPanel, emails that SpamAssassin deems as spam can be automatically discarded, based on a threshold score you set. SpamAssassin assigns a score to every email based upon its inbuilt set of rules and all emails above this threshold are marked as spam. The default threshold score is 5 and is quite aggresive.

Features:

• Effective rule set: SpamAssassin has a wide range of local and network rules to identify spam. This makes it more difficult for spammers to work around one aspect of the message to avoid detection.
• Free software: SpamAssassin is distributed free and under similar terms and conditions as Perl itself.
• Easy customization: Rules, rule weights and user readable text are stored in plain text configuration files to a great extent, which the user (or system administrator) can modify or add new rules.
• Portable: SpamAssassin has a well-designed API and is not limited to traditional local-delivery-to-spool case. Using the SpamAssassin classes, it can be used on a variety of email systems - Procmail, Postfix, Qmail, Sendmail etc.

• Login to cPanel and then click on the "Mail" icon.
• Click on the "SpamAssassin".
• If using the first time, please click on the "Enable SpamAssassin" link.
• If you want all e-mail that Spam Assassin identifies as spam to be delivered to the "spam" folder, go back and click on "Enable Spam Box"

Now you can again go back and click on "Configure Spamassassin" to set a threshold of how aggressive Spamassassin should be when examining e-mail. Spamassassin assigns a score (on a scale one to 10) to every email it examines. Higher points indicate a higher the chance of it being spam. Usually a setting between 5 and 6 is optimum, however, you can set this to a higher number to decrease the chance of useful email being marked as SPAM.

The following Spamassassin configuration options are available:

• required_score - The number of hits / score above which a certain email is marked as spam. Default setting of 5 is quite aggressive.
• rewrite_header subject - This the text added to the subject line of email marked as spam.
• blacklist_from - Enter email addresses whose emails you always want marked as spam.
• whitelist_from - Enter email addresses whose emails you never want marked as spam.

Please note: The asterix symbol (*) is a wildcard, for example *@isp.com, or *.domain.net etc. and can be used for blacklisting or whitelisting email addresses.

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