Frequently Asked Questions

Spam is a direct consequence of your on- and off-line activity - generally a big problem, unless you are very careful with your email address. your spam is attached to your email address, not the server, wherever you take your email address your spam will follow, the only question is how you deal with it.
for your spam defense, in cPanel you have a sophisticated open source program SpamAssassin - to activate it click its icon and then the Enable button.
that program is not perfect, there is no 100% protection without blocking emails you want to read - the simple reason for it is that there is no universal definition of spam - my spam might be of interest to you and vice versa, indeed that is the reason spam works, ie. continues.
however, you can "train" SpamAssassin to kill your spam, as explained further down.

SpamAssassin when set to Auto-Delete will filter and destroy mail according to a Score setting - the lower the number more messages will be identified as spam and deleted - you will never see them. the messages not marked as Spam go to the Inbox.
if the Auto-Delete option is not enabled, suspicious emails are put in the Spam folder, which should show automatically in RoundCube and Horde you need to click "Folders" and then Subscribe to that folder. you must review and empty the Spam box regularly, otherwise your spam will use up all disk space and email will stop working.
you can not set a Score with this setting.

the more aggressive the setting (lower number) the more chances that legitimate email might be blocked, but you can use Whitelist for senders you never want blocked - use *@samplesite.com to allow all mail from that site.
Blacklist is for messages that are not shown as spam, but you don't want them.

you can set up rules in your local email program (Outlook, mail or such like) - to filter all email containing word ***SPAM*** in the subject line (that is added by SpamAssassin) into a local folder called Spam.

in addition, create a "Missed-Spam" folder where you manually put messages you define as spam in order to "train" SpamAssassin to continually analyse spam:
1 make sure your email connection is set to IMAP, not POP3
2 create a "Missed-Spam" folder online (in your webmail), put all your spam messages there
3 your legitimate email must remain on the server, at least for some time

once you have a large number (few hundred, 1000+) of spam and legitimate emails in the account we can set up a script which will automatically check and block spam messages based on your on-going choices - this can be very effective.

more detailed information on SpamAssassin in the cPanel documentation.

manually deleting spam is explained in ›FAQ177

logging in to your control panel (cPanel) is explained in ›FAQ9