How To Use SpamAssassin With cPanel

SpamAssassin is one of the most popular open-source antispam out there. The best part is that it can be integrated into cPanel and managed easily from a web interface.

If you want to use SpamAssassin to filter your emails, the first thing you’ll have to do is enable it.

Assuming you’re already logged in cPanel, click on the SpamAssassin icon:

The click on the Enable button to activate SpamAssassin. cPanel should then tell you that its been enabled so click on the Go Back link at the bottom so we can go back and configure it.

Now since we don’t know if SpamAssassin will tag legitimate emails as spam, we’re going to disable automatic deletion. Click on the Disable Auto-Delete Spam button.

The way SpamAssassin determines if an email is spam or not is by assigning it a score based on various criterias like certain keywords or keyphrases, the origin domain, the mail server where it came, etc. If the score is high enough, the email gets tagged as spam.

You could set the spam score using the dropdown menu from the Filters panel but doing so would re-enable auto-deletion of spam.

Instead click on the Configure SpamAssassin button at the bottom. From there, you’ll be able to set various settings.

Required Score

This is where you’re going to set the required score for an email to be tagged as spam. The lower it is, the more it will catch legitimate emails. The higher the score is, the more it will let spam go through.

Since we haven’t activated auto-deletion, you can start by setting the score value to 3 or 4. The default value of 5 is a little bit high in my opinion. What will happen is that the mail server will append “*** SPAM ***” to the subject of emails it considered as spam. So try it out for a while and adjust it if needed.

Once you’ve got the right score value, you may enable auto-deletion if you want.

Blacklist From

If you want to automatically block emails from a particular address or an entire domain, enter it here. If you want to block a whole domain, use the wildcard like this:

*@hotmail.com

Whitelist From

To make sure you always get emails from a particular address or domains, enter it here. This works the same way as for the Blacklist From format.

Once you’re done, click on the Save button and the settings will be applied instantly!

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