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Managing Spam First, we’ll take a look at BoxTrapper.
BoxTrapper works as a filter and through a challenge- response verification system allows or denies email sent to your address. The sender of the email must respond to a verification email to verify they are a real person before their email is delivered. Once they are verified, BoxTrapper sends the message to the intended recipient.
You can enable BoxTrapper in cPanel under Mail by selecting the Manage link next to the appropriate email account. Once enabled, you will need to configure BoxTrapper.
known as Bayesian filters. These filters are based on the mathematical probability that an email is spam due to several factors: words frequently used in spam messages, the relevant subset of the words in the message, and rare words. The default score for marking a message as spam is 5, which is pretty aggressive and may need to be set higher for your needs. It is a good starting place, so give that a try first before changing it to a higher number and not blocking enough.
BoxTrapper depends on three lists to effectively deliver mail: a whitelist, a blacklist and an ignore list. These lists are used to decide what fate an email will have when being delivered to you.
A whitelist is a list of all email addresses that you allow to send mail to you without going through further spam filters. This list is made up of email addresses that you send mail to and email addresses of those who have gone through the verification process. A blacklist contains email addresses that will automatically be blocked, but will have a warning message sent to them upon receipt of mail. For this list, you have addresses and subject lines that are not allowed to pass-through the filter. And of course, there’s the ignore list. The ignore list contains addresses and subject lines that will not be allowed to pass through the filter and will not be sent a friendly warning message. You always have the option to edit these manually as you see fit, adding messages, subjects or email addresses.
From your cPanel WebMail home page, you can access the BoxTrapper configuration to do many things. As I mentioned earlier you can edit your white-, black-, and ignore lists, as well as provide addresses that authenticated messages can be forwarded to. One nice feature of BoxTrapper is the ability to review any messages that have been filtered in the Review Log. This is especially helpful if someone insists they have sent a message but you haven’t received it! You can also check out the Review Queue and delete or allow through messages that are waiting for authentication.
The WebMail home page also allows you to set a minimum threshold score from SpamAssassin for an email to completely bypass the BoxTrapper filters. SpamAssassin is a great tool to keep the spam at a minimum. You can enable SpamAssassin from your cPanel home page in the Mail section by clicking on the SpamAssassin icon.
SpamAssassin examines every email message for spam characteristics and assigns the email an overall score. The spam scores are created by performing a variety of tests against the email message, determining the spamicity of the email. These types of tests are
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If you find that the number you have chosen blocks most spam messages but a few stragglers get through, you can add those to the blacklist. You can enter a specific email address (
user@example.com), entire domains (*@
example.com), or partial addresses (user?@
example.com ). In this same pattern, you can add addresses to a whitelist allowing messages to bypass the scrutiny of SpamAssassin.
If you have command line access with your cPanel account, you can take this one step further and set individual tests that are run to have higher or lower scores. More information can be found at:
http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests.html.
One thing to keep in mind when configuring SpamAssassin is the option to delete all messages that are marked as spam. While this may seem like a good idea, if a message that isn’t spam exceeds the defined score, it will be deleted. This is definitely an option you only want to enable once you are certain that SpamAssassin is configured properly, unless you don’t care that non-spam messages occasionally get deleted. Once you configure SpamAssassin, enable the Spam Box option. This creates an additional folder in your inbox to house any messages marked as spam and alleviates a cluttered inbox.
One last thing you can do within cPanel to help alleviate spam is to require email authentication for your domain(s). The authentication methods provided are DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) systems. These features help to reduce the number of failed delivery notification messages you receive as a result of someone forging messages from your domains. Have you ever gotten a message telling you that your email didn’t go through but you don’t remember ever actually SENDING a message to that person? That’s exactly what this helps to prevent. Essentially, these two systems are both ways to identify your domain in a way that other servers know you are legit. If the information provided in the DomainKeys or the SPF records don’t match, the email is considered spam.
Following these methods on my personal domains has helped to greatly reduce the amount of spam I see every morning in my inbox. You don’t have to be a computer genius to get them working quickly and efficiently, so take a look at them today and start making your inbox a spam-free folder! P!
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