SPAM is an unfortunate fact of life. You can reduce the amount of SPAM you receive by following the tips on this page. The cPanel web hosting software is an easy to use, rich on features tool for managing all your Website needs.

One feature that is overlooked on cPanel web hosting software is the ability to manage your own e-mail accounts and handle unsolicited commercial e-mail, we call them SPAM.

And unfortunately Unsolicited Commercial e-mails are getting worse as time goes on.

Now you know why I chose this subject, the Spam is a consequence of freedom, but everybody is sick and tired of SPAM.

Prevent your email addresses getting on SPAM lists :

  • Never put your email address on your web site. Automatic email address harvesters will find it and add it to SPAM mailing lists. You should hide it in some way, for example:
    • Create an image showing your email address and put that on your web pages
    • Use JavaScript to hide you address
  • Never reply to SPAM
  • Do not click on links in SPAM emails. This usually confirms that your email address is active and you'll get more SPAM.
  • Avoid "catch-all" email rules since these will be susceptible to generic (e.g. sales@yourdomain.com) or randomly generated email addresses.

You are the best manager of your e-mail accounts!!

 

Yes, it is true, you are the best manager!

You probably already have a couple of e-mails with free services as GMail, Hotmail or through your ISP.

 You might be wondering why you should get more e-mail accounts:

  • If you running your own business you need to offer a more polished appearance. If you communicate with customers via Hotmail, you don't look professional
  • You need to have complete control of your account. Send automated emails, create, delete email or forward email from one domain to other domain and so on.
  • You can improve anti-spam feature using technologies cPanel offer to you.
  • Have many choices to access your e-mail: via any web browser, download e-mail to your PC, or both
  • You are limited by the disk space and features of your web hosting plan. This is why you must be careful when you chose your hosting plan.
  • You can manage e-mail via cPanel and also keep at least one other e-mail that is not part of your domain for security.
  • E-mail via cPanel has a lot of features but it is easy to learn, and use them.

 


 Let's talk about the e-mail features now.

 

 

cPanel e-mail features

 

My intend was to list all the features but the picture is so clear you can just read them, and in the process you will start to be familiar with cPanel. I promise, it is a very short learning experience.

The names of icons are intuitive but I'll comment some of them.

If you want to create or manage an existing email account, click on e-mail accounts (in other systems it is an icon named "Manage/Add/Remove Accounts"), and fill in info on the top part of the screen:

If you want to manage an existing email account click in one of the left functions in the bottom of above screen where all your emails accounts are listed.

 

 SpamAssassin  

The purpose of this lens is to show you that cPanel has a software to protect you against SPAM. There are a lot of packages that do just that but sometime you must pay fancy fees to get a package.

 SpamAssassin is an automated email filtering system that attempts to identify spam messages based on the content of the email's headers and body.

  • blocks known spammers.
  • rewrite the headers of other email messages, so you can filter them out.

SpamBox will deliver any emails identified as spam by SpamAssassin into a separate mail folder named "spam". This "spam" folder will fill up and should be emptied regularly. 

I keep Spambox  disabled
 

 

Click the Enable SpamAssassin button to turn it on.
Click the Configure SpamAssassin to edit the rules.

To configure SpamAssassin you must fill in a form with the following info:
 

 

These 5 lines in the configuration ares are reserved for you to add e-mail addresses that you notice SpamAssassin is not marking as SPAM, but you want to.
blacklist_from
blacklist_from
blacklist_from
blacklist_from
 blacklist_from

Set the number of hits required before a mail is considered SPAM. "n.nn" can be an integer or a real number. 5.00 is the default setting, and is quite aggressive but you can change this to a higher number if you find that message that are not SPAM are always labeled as SPAM.
 

 

required_score 5 (by default, the smaller number the higher restriction you get)

Text added to the Subject line of mails that are considered spam.
rewrite_header subject

Assign scores (the number of points for a hit) to a given test. Scores can be positive or negative real numbers or integers. If only one valid score is listed, then that score is always used for a test. If four valid scores are listed, then the score that is used depends on how SpamAssassin is being used.
 

 

Setting a rule's score to 0 will disable that rule from running.
score....
score...
score...
score...
score...

The last 5 lines are for whitelisted addresses. The meaning is that SpamAssassin automatically marks them as SPAM but you feel should not be.
whitelist_from
whitelist_from
whitelist_from
whitelist_from
 whitelist_from

At this point you can save.

 If the SpamAssassin is incorrectly labeling files, return to CPanel and edit The SpamAssassin settings and correct them.


More About email Filtering 

SpamBox is a server-side method used to automatically filter out messages marked as spam by SpamAssassin.
The messages are not deleted and they reside in a specific directory on the server.
 You can view what is in that folder;

  • If you use SquirreMail web mail client
  • By appending "/spam" to the end of your e-mail account user name in your e-mail client

At this point I hope you have an idea how powerful is cPanel and how many advance feature cPanel provides for you.