One question that I often get is, “How can I cut down on the amount of spam I get?”. Well if your hosting provider gives you the spam fighting tool called SpamAssassin, it can be a very easy process. In only six steps you can go from looking at nothing but crap to going back to only seeing E-mails you want to see.
1. Navigate yourself to the SpamAssassin section inside your control panel.
From cPanel, this is usually done by logging in, then going to “Mail” and then clicking on the link that says “SpamAssassin”.
2. Now this screen might get you a little worried. There are a few buttons, talk of disable and enabled services and all that jazz. Don’t worry, you can not break anything here.
What you need to do next is click on the button or link that says “Enable SpamAssassin”.
3. You should notice after that happens your current status changes to “SpamAssassin is currently: Enabled”. This is good but we are not done yet. Next I want you to click on “Configure SpamAssassin”.
4. Here you see a lot of confusing text and empty boxes. We are not going to worry about the more advanced options you can edit in here. We might save that for another podcast.
What I want you to do now is change your default value to “5″. This is a good average score for grading the spam you get. While tweaking this you might want to lower or raise the score, depending on how aggressive the spam you get is.
5. Next to the “rewrite_header subject” text I want you to put in a value that would easily be picked up on by any E-mail client out there. For example I have the word “CRAP” in mine. This way later on down the road, any spam that graded with the score “5″ will have the word “CRAP” in front of it.
6. Now go into your favorite E-mail client and create a new filter or rule. Have it send everything that has the word “CRAP” (or whatever other word you picked in the previous step) in the subject line to the spam folder or trash.
Till you know what it is catching and you can confirm it is all spam I would send it to a “half way there” folder before actually putting it in the trash. This way you can check for false positives and adjust your score as you need to. If all went well, then your spam intake should be cut down or totally assassinated.
Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 100!
