How to manage spam email

All of our hosting packages come with a number of email accounts. This allows you to create individual email accounts for each user or destination.

Lets say you have 2 users that need email accounts, Jane & Freddie. We also want email addresses for Sales, Returns and Support. This gives us a total of 5 email account.

First you need to login to cPanel. Select the Mail Icon. From the list choose Add/Remove/Manage Accounts. If you have already created some email accounts these will be listed here. To create a new account click [ Add Account ]. There a 3 simple options here, enter the email name (ie. Jane), a password and an optional quota. (The quota is how much diskspace this account will be allowed before mail is rejected).

If you have extra domains on your account or sub-domains you will notice next to the email field a drop down list. This allows you to add a user to a specific domain. For example, if your store has domain.com, domain,co.uk and domain.net you can setup users for each domain individually or create a forwarder (We'll discuss that in a sec). If you only want email specifically sent to jane@domain.com to be handled than simply add just this account.

If you want all email sent to jane@domain.com, jane@domain.co.uk and jane@domain.net to be handled you will need to setup some forwarders. Go back to the mail functions list (here). Select Forwarders from the list, click [ Add Forwarder ]. You will now see two fields and a drop down. In the first field enter jane, select the domain (this will be any domain other than the one setup previously). In the second field enter the domain to forward the mail to. (This is the email address we just setup, jane@domain.com). You will need to repeat this for every account extra/sub domain you need to use.

Now we've created our accounts we want to make sure we setup some effective rules for eliminating spam. The first thing we need to do is turn off 'Catch-all'. Catch-all is a system where by any mail sent to a specific domain is accepted. Obviously spammers love this as they don't have to know your email address just your domain name.

Now that we have all the accounts we need we can turn off catch-all. To do this return to the mail options and select Default Address. You will see a list of all your domains and sub domains.

Under each domain you will see your current settings, this could be :blackhole:, :fail: or another email address. We want to set ours to fail. Fail we bounce any unrouted emails back to the sender.

Click on the [ Set Default Address ] link. You will see a drop down containing your domain names, select the first domain and enter :fail: no such user address here in the field and click change. Repeat this for all of your domains.

Spam is becoming more and more of a burden to email accounts, many users have to sift through hundreds of emails to try and decipher the good from the bad. You may have noticed that many of your emails are tagged with the words {Spam ?} or {Definitely Spam?} in the subject. These tags are added by the spam software on the server. Using these tags will can effectively filter up to 99% of unwanted mail.

There are many ways to handle the spam messages, you could delete them all at the server, you could receive them and then filter with your mail client or if your clinically insane you could do nothing and read all of the spam.

We like to think you want to do something about it so here's how:

Firstly login to cPanel and create a new account with the username spam. Now return to the cPanel homepage and scroll to the bottom, you should see an icon labeled 'MailScanner Configuration'. Once your in the Mailscanner screen you will see many option for handling your email. The most effective method we find is to direct all Low scoring {Spam ?} and High scoring {Definitely Spam?} emails to our spam account. If you want you can choose to delete all low or high scoring spam at the server.

For each domain make sure Spam Scanning is set to Yes, Low scoring Spam is set to forward to spam@yourdomain.com and High scoring Spam is set to the same.

Click change and after about 10 minutes your settings will become active.

All that's left is to setup your mail client to use these settings. This can be found here:

Outlook Express Spam Filtering Configuration

Outlook 2002/XP Spam Filtering Configuration

One last thing to note, if some of your recipients constantly get tagged as spam, simply add there address or domain to your white list. The same applies if you want to ban a domain, you just need it to add it to your blacklist.