Setting Up Spam Filter
If you receive undesirable correspondence to an e-mail address that you cannot or do not want to remove, consider setting up spam filter for your mailbox. To do this,
- Enable SpamAssassin spam filter on the Plesk server, if you installed the SpamAssassin package on the server, and
- Install spam filtering software of your choice to work with e-mail program on your home or office computer.
To switch on spam filtering for a mailbox:
- Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
- Click the required domain name in the list.
- Click the
Mail icon in the Services group. - Click the e-mail address you need.
- Make sure that SpamAssassin is enabled: see whether the SpamAssassin status shows On in the Info group. If it shows Off, click the
Mailbox icon in the Tools group, then select the Enable spam filtering check box, and click OK.
Now all the incoming mail will be filtered on the server side. By default, spam filter does not delete spam mail, it only adds the "X-Spam-Flag: YES" and "X-Spam-Status: Yes" headers to the message, and "*****SPAM*****" text string to the beginning of Subject line of each message recognized as spam. These settings are fine if you prefer to filter mail with a filtering program installed on your local computer – once mail has been retrieved from your mailbox.
If you rely entirely on the Plesk server's spam filter, you may configure it so as to automatically delete the suspicious messages as they come. To configure the spam filter, follow the instructions below.
To configure the spam filter:
- Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
- Click the required domain name in the list.
- Click the
Mail icon in the Services group. - Click the e-mail address you need.
- Click the
Spam Filter icon in the Tools group. Configure the following settings as desired: - To save your changes, click Set.
- If you do not want to receive e-mail from specific senders, add their e-mail addresses to the spam filter's black list.
- To add an entry to the black list, under Black list group, type an e-mail address into the E-mail pattern box. For example: address@spammers.net, *@spammers.net. An asterisk (*) means any combination of symbols. Click Add.
- To remove an entry from the black list, select it and click Remove.
- If you want to be sure that you will not miss e-mail from specific senders, add their e-mail addresses to the spam filter's white list.
- To add an entry to the white list, under White list group, type an e-mail address into the E-mail pattern box. For example: address@mycompany.com, *@mycompany.com. An asterisk (*) means any combination of symbols. Click Add.
- To remove an entry from the black list, select it and click Remove.
You can improve accuracy of spam detection by training the spam filter on the e-mail messages that you have in your mailbox.
To improve accuracy of spam detection:
- Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
- Click the required domain name in the list.
- Click the
Mail icon in the Services group. - Click the e-mail address you need.
- Click the
Spam Filter icon in the Tools group. - Click the
Training icon in the Tools group. All e-mail messages you have in your mailbox are presented on the screen. Each message is accompanied by an icon in the left column, which tells if a message is recognized as spam -
, non-spam -
, or not recognized at all -
. If you have already trained your spam filter on a message and the results were recorded in the spam filter's database, an icon
is shown in the right column.
- Train the spam filter.
In most cases, you can tell if a message is spam by looking at its subject line and sender's name. If they do not give you any clue, try looking inside the message using your e-mail program or webmail interface.
- To mark a message as spam, select the corresponding check box and click 'It's Spam!'.
- To mark a message as not spam, select the corresponding check box and click 'It's Not Spam'.
- To remove any information on a given message from the spam filter database, select the corresponding check box and click 'Forget It'.
- Once finished with training, you can remove spam e-mails from your mailbox using your e-mail program or webmail interface.
If you have accidentally made your spam filter learn a great number of spam e-mails as non-spam or vice versa, your spam filter will likely produce incorrect results. In this case, clear the spam filter's database and then repeat training.
To clear spam filter's database:
- Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
- Click the required domain name in the list.
- Click the
Mail icon in the Services group. - Click the e-mail address you need.
- Click the
Spam Filter icon in the Tools group. - Click the
Training icon in the Tools group. - Click the Clear button.
To switch off spam filtering for a mailbox:
- Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
- Click the required domain name in the list.
- Click the
Mail icon in the Services group. - Click the e-mail address you need.
- Click the
Mailbox icon in the Tools group, then clear the Enable spam filtering check box, and click OK.