The Spam Filters tool in cPanel uses 'Apache SpamAssassin' in order to examine incoming email and tests for spam characteristics. It uses various spam filtering and network tests to screen incoming email and apply a score to the email which can be used to determine if a message should be discarded or otherwise filtered.
The Spam Filters tool is available in your cPanel under the Mail tools. Inside the Spam Filters tool:
- To enable/disable Apache SpamAssassin, toggle the option 'Process New Emails and Mark them as Spam
- To change the 'Spam Threshold' above which an email will be flagged as spam click on 'Spam Threshold Score' - the default setting is 5 and you will see on-screen information and several other options in the drop down menu. 'Update Scoring Options' as needed
- You can then use the separate Email Filters (formerly 'User Level Filtering') and Global Email Filters (formerly 'Account Level Filtering') tools, also in your cPanel, to create filtering rules based on the spam score among other things.
- Emails with a certain spam score or higher can also be auto-deleted by toggling 'Automatically Delete New Spam (Auto-Delete)' on. You can then set the separate 'Auto-Delete Threshold Score'. Note this is separate to, but cannot be less than, the 'Spam Threshold' score; that is, you can either auto-delete all emails flagged as spam, or set a separate higher threshold to only delete emails with a particularly high spam score.
- Under Additional Configurations (For Advanced Users) you can also whitelist or blacklist all emails from a particular sending address or addresses. Click 'Show Additional Configurations' and then either 'Edit Spam Whitelist Settings' and or 'Edit Spam Blacklist Settings' as needed.
When you add the addresses to the whitelist or blacklist, use * as a wildcard to represent multiple characters and ? to represent a single-character wildcard.
The following examples demonstrate how to properly use wildcards:
user@example.com — Blacklists a single email address.
*@example.com — Blacklists all the addresses at example.com.
?ser@example.com — For example, User@example.com would be blacklisted, but AUser@example.com would not be blacklisted.
- Also under Additional Configurations (For Advanced Users) you can Calculated Spam Score Settings to configure even more advanced rules. A link to the Apache SpamAssassin documentation can be found in the Spam Filters tool if you would like to look into this very advanced option.