SPAMAssassin and cPanel

This tutorial describes how to use the SpamAssassin tool in cPanel to reduce the amount of unwanted e-mail. Learn to do it yourself.

Turning on SpamAssassin:

1. Login to WHM.
2. Under Server Configuration on the top of the left-hand navigation bar, click on Tweak Settings.
3. Click the Mail tab.
4. Select On for Enable SpamAssassin spam filter.

To force all the users on your VPS to use SpamAssassin:

1. Log into WHM.
2. Scroll down the left-hand navigation bar to Service Configuration and click on Exim Configuration Manager.
3. Select the Apache SpamAssassin Options tab.
4. Set Apache Spam Assassin: Forced Global ON to On.

This will filter all of your email for spam. It will not, however, force your users to do anything with it after it’s filtered. It will simply mark spam as spam, nothing more.

To prevent spam from being sent from your server:

If you host email for your clients and want to prevent RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) from blacklisting your server due to inadvertent (or intentional!) spam your customers might be sending, you can configure SpamAssassin to run on outgoing messages as well.

1. Log into WHM.
2. Scroll down the left-hand navigation bar to Service Configuration and click on Exim Configuration Manager.
3. Select the Apache SpamAssassin Options tab.
4. Select one of the two options:
   • Scan outgoing non-local messages for spam and reject based on the Apache SpamAssassin internal spam_score setting. (Grades outgoing emails based on a score of 5.)
   • Scan outgoing messages for spam and reject based on defined Apache SpamAssassin score. (Grades outgoing emails based on a specified score.)

The first option will grade your email based on your system’s incoming spam-scoring settings, wherever they are set. If you want to get your SpamAssassin score below a certain number value you have predefined, use the second option.

Note: Apache SpamAssassin will not scan messages that are being forwarded to remote email addresses.

Configuring your internal SpamAssassin score threshold:

If you see too much spam getting by your filters, you can lock them down further by adjusting your internal SpamAssassin score.

1. Log into WHM.
2. Scroll down the left-hand navigation bar to Service Configuration and click on Exim Configuration Manager.
3. Select the Filters tab.
4. Specify a score under Apache SpamAssassin bounce spam score threshold. Lower numbers will make your filters label more email as Spam.

Note: It is important to understand that making any of these changes will affect all email accounts on the entire server.