I figured I'd pop in here and provide a little 'Spam Assassin' micro tutorial.
Spam assassin is a very powerful tool, and if you use it to the fullest, you'll find that it can eliminate a very significant number of the spam emails, even the ones that are currently running around out there with tons of <worthless tags> and garbage text.
In fact, this morning I woke up and there were ZERO spams in my inbox.
This is a multi step / multi day process, however. If you're interested, read on.
(also, I don't take all the credit for this. A guy from my old host wrote the script that you'll see at the bottom of this message. Props to he who is known as 'freeranger')
STEP ONE:- click the spam assassin icon
- click enable spam assassin
When the screen refreshes, you should see the bold black and red text:
Code:
Spam Assassin is currently: enabled
DO NOT enable 'spambox'.
Click 'configure spam assassin' now.
STEP TWO: Configuring Spam Assassin basic
The screen for configuring spam assassin looks complicated, but it's not.
At this time we'll only worry about 'whitelist' and a few other options.
The whitelist is a list of email domains or accounts that you always want to get mail from. I don't recommend putting entire domains in if you have certain addresses that you know and want. This helps prevent address-spoofing spam.
First, let's have spam asssassin flag messages that it thinks are spam for us.
Find the box that says
rewrite-subject.
delete any value in that box, and enter the number 1.
Second, find the box that says
subject_tag.
This is where you enter the 'flag' message that will be put at the beginning of any suspected spams subject line. Enter (without the quotes) "**Possible-Spam**" here.
Third, find the box marked
required_hits.
Here you enter the minimum score that a message must have to trigger the flagging you just set up above. Mine is set to 4.5, but initially - to prevent a bunch of false positives, I would set it to 5 or 6.
Fourth, find the
whitelist_from box. You'll see 4 boxes to enter whitelist_from addresses. You're not limited to four, by the way. Enter up to four here, then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and hit SAVE. Cpanel will now add 4 more blank lines for whitelist_from addresses. Continue here until all of your necessary whitelist names are her.
NOTE you don't need to whitelist everyone. This is helpful however to whitelist people who are in AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo - or any other domain that is often seen as SPAM. My personal whitelist is only 12 entries.
Don't forget to hit SAVE at the bottom of the Spam Assassin configuration page, or all your work is lost. When you save, it refreshes the page - so you can then click the 'home' icon to return to Cpanel.
Congratulations You've just completed basic spam-assassin configuration.
From this moment on, email that comes to your domain will be examined by Spam Assassin. If Spam Assassin determines, through various rules tests, that it thinks you have a spam - (each test adds 'points) and it reaches the point threshold that you've set, the email subjects will be flagged "**POSSIBLE-SPAM**buy c;all'is today = know doctorz needed"
To be continued.