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How to help prevent spam

Spam can be a really annoying time to time, but it also may carry potential threats to your account or computer. Below we provide instructions on how to prevent spam with cPanel.

How to Prevent Email Spam With cPanel

All the accounts with cPanel include Spam Filters, which is a special tool that can help you get rid of unwanted e-mail. Below we explain everything you need to know about Spam Filters and how to use them to protect your account from most of spam.

Spam Filters

Spam Filters is an automated filtering system that uses a variety of techniques to identify and filter spam messages. So what happens when you enable Spam Filters powered by Apache SpamAssassin™? Well, the system uses scores to rate the likelihood that a message is a spam. You can manage messages that Spam Filters marks as spam in a number of ways. For example, you can route messages marked as spam to specific folders, or you can automatically delete them. You can enable a feature that will allow Spam Filters to delete all messages which it recognizes as spam. We, however, don’t recommend using this feature as the filtering system is not always right and you can lose some important information by enabling the feature.

Enabling Spam Filters

If you want to activate Spam Filters, you should follow the steps provided below:

· Log in to cPanel.

· In the EMAIL section of the cPanel home screen, click Spam Filters.

· On the Spam Filters page, click Process New Emails and Mark them as Spam.

· To enable auto-deletion of spam messages, click Automatically Delete New Spam (Auto-Delete).

§ To change the deletion trigger level, click Configure Auto-Delete Settings. In the Auto-Delete Threshold Score text box, type the score number, and then click Update Auto-Delete Score.

Configuring mail spam filters

You can decide what kinds of messages will be seen as spam by customizing and configuring the mail spam filters. Also, you can put specific e-mail addresses to Whitelist or Blacklist, which will help you in the future to avoid consistent spam from the same company/person and figure out which companies you do trust.

If you want to customize spam filters through cPanel, here is what you need to do:

· Log in to cPanel.

· In the EMAIL section of the cPanel home screen, click Spam Filters.

· On the Spam Filters page, click Show Additional Configurations.

· To configure whitelists, click Edit Spam Whitelist Settings:

§ Click Add A New “whitelist_from” item, and then in the whitelist_from text box, you can specify e-mail addresses that are trusted senders.

§ Click Update Whitelist (whitelist_from).

· To configure whitelists, click Edit Spam Blacklist Settings:

§ Click Add A New “blacklist_from” item, and then in the blacklist_from text box, you can specify e-mail addresses that are known spammers.

§ Click Update Blacklist (blacklist_from).

· To configure spam score settings, click Configure Calculated Spam Score Settings:

§ Click Add A New “scores” item.

§ In the scores list box, select the test name, and then type the score value.

· Click Update Scoring Options.

Disabling Spam Filters

In case you want to disable spam filters, you can do it any time you want. That’s if you are, for example, unable to receive a non-spam message because the system sees it as spam. Just disable the spam filters and ask the person to resend you the message. It then should appear in your normal mailbox.

If you want to disable spam filters for your account, follow the steps below:

· Log in to cPanel.

· In the EMAIL section of the cPanel home screen, click Spam Filters.

· On the Spam Filters page, click Process New Emails and Mark them as Spam. cPanel disables Spam Filters.

How to help prevent outgoing e-mail from being marked as spam

There are a lot of mail servers, and all of them use different techniques in order to identify spam e-mails. Unfortunately, spammers constantly adapt to those techniques and find new ways to send people their spam. That’s why administrators of those mail servers have to constantly change and configure their tools so that the spammers do go through. Because of this endless loop, you can never entirely make sure that the emails you send to people won’t be recognized as spam.

Still, there are some things that you can so in order to minimize the chance of your outgoing messages to be put into the spam folder of receivers. Here are some of the steps you can take:

· If possible, do not send HTML-only messages (send plain-text messages instead, or multi-part MIME messages with a text/plain component).

· If you do send HTML-only messages, make sure they use valid HTML markup. You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to test content (you can test a URL, upload a file, or paste HTML into a text box).

· Avoid using lots of exclamation marks (!) or dollar signs ($) in the message subject.