Knowledgebase: Email Help
Spam Assassin Explained, what is it? how do you use it? and more!
Posted by kumar, Last modified by Kim S. on 27 January 2016 07:07 PM

What is a Spam Assassin?
Spam Assassin is an e-mail spam filtering system that sits side by side to your account with us, to help block, mark or filter out mails that you don't want.

How do I access Spam Assassin?
First thing you will want to do is log into your cPanel. From there, under the "E-mail" box look at the bottom for a link that reads "Spam Assassin". From here it will tell you if Spam Assassin is currently enabled or disabled. Clicking the boxes to enable or disable Spam Assassin is how you can turn it on or off. To configure the Spam Assassin settings click the button that reads: "Configure Spam Assassin (required to rewrite subjects)"

How do I configure Spam Assassin?
If you do not know what it is you are looking at, the next screen could be a little confusing. To help you understand here's a break down of what you should see on the screen and what to do with it:

required_hits - The number of e-mails received before marked as spam.
rewrite_subject - The tells Spam Assassin if it should rewrite your subject line or not as you define. (1 is yes and 0 is no)
subject_tag - What the spam is marked with in the subject line. (usually ***SPAM*** or something else that could be picked up by your own mail filters on your mail client of choice)
blacklist_from - An e-mail address you definitely want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address filtered)
whitelist_from - An e-mail address you definitely do NOT want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address NOT filtered)

Once you're done, just hit save, and whatever you defined on the earlier page will now be in effect. If you picked to rewrite the subject, then you could now go into your mail client and write a new "rule" that would filter all mail with "***SPAM***" to go into a SPAM folder so that you could check it from time to time making sure you did not get any false positives.

How do I use the Spam Box?
You can turn your spam box enable and disable from the same page as Spam Assassin. It's just that easy! With the recent upgrades to cPanel, the team has been paying more attention to the users of Spam Assassin.

In the previous build you would need to use a imap client to get to your spam box. Well not anymore. You can create a "new" e-mail account that has precisely the same settings as your e-mail account, but add: "/spam" to the end of the e-mail account user name. This will retrieve only your Spam Box mail.

In order for this to be useful, you will want to set up your e-mail client to deliver this Spam Box mail to a special folder (perhaps called spam?) automatically.


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