How to Enable SpamAssassin

You all have received spam emails on personal email addresses and hopefully, you all know how annoying it is. When unwanted messages flood your business inbox, it can put you in a bit of a bad mood for a few minutes.

Malware and phishing attacks can have devastating consequences for your online business, and even though you may think you can’t be fooled by online scammers, the high volume of unsolicited messages can cause legitimate communications to be missed.

Spam is a serious problem that should not be underestimated. To help our clients better filter their incoming communications, we’ve integrated SpamAssassin into HostPanel, which comes as part of our managed hosting solution.

What is SpamAssassin?

SpamAssassin (or Apache SpamAssassin as it’s been known since 2004) has been around for almost two decades now and is considered one of the most reliable spam filtering systems available today. It analyzes every incoming email and considers various factors to determine whether it might be spam or not.

SpamAssassin first checks whether the sender or mail server is present in one of the publicly-available spam block lists. It also looks for aspects related to message format and language that are commonly associated with unsolicited email (eg, excessive use of all-caps text and grammatical mistakes). All of these factors contribute to a message’s SpamAssassin score. The higher the score, the more spam the email is.

To ensure that no legitimate communications are lost, SpamAssassin will not automatically delete incoming emails from your hosting account. Instead, it adds [spam] to the subject. That way, you can manually sort through all messages while easily identifying suspicious ones, or you can configure your email client to automatically send them to the junk folder.

Enabling SpamAssassin in HostPanel

SpamAssassin is configured separately for each individual HostPanel user account. Here’s how to enable it:

1. Log in to HostPanel’s user interface. The default login URL is https://domain.com/hostpanel. (use your actual domain name instead of domain.com)

   

2. Open the SpamAssassin feature and check its status. The SpamAssassin feature is controlled through a tool available in the Email section of HostPanel’s homepage. After you open it, you should be able to see if SpamAssassin is enabled or not.

   

3. Click Enable SpamAssassin after you click the button that enables the feature, HostPanel will ask you to confirm the changes. This completes the process.