Our SPAM Protection
From OCS Support Wiki
This article will explain a bit about how we prevent SPAM on our cPanel mail systems.
Contents |
[edit] Real-Time Blacklisting
Before mail is ever received, we check the sending server against several blacklists, including bl.spamcop.net and zen.spamhaus.org. These lists prevent much of the SPAM from reaching your Inbox and don't produce many false positives. If we reject an e-mail because of one of these lists, not only will the sender get a bounce notification explaining why (so they can contact their technical support team or network administrator), but they will likely have trouble sending to many people as these blacklists are used by many mail servers.
[edit] Virus Check
We perform a simple virus check on the message at this point. It's not an exhaustive scan but it does weed out many common viruses. We also block dangerous attachments like exe, pif, com and scr, among others, to help prevent viruses. This virus protection is very effective but is not designed to replace an anti-virus program on your computer. We recommend you install one and keep it updated.
[edit] SpamAssassin
The messages that make it through our blacklisting procedure and virus check now run through SpamAssassin. If SpamAssassin determines that the SPAM score (a number it assigns to each e-mail) is well beyond any reasonable chance of it being a legitimate e-mail, it will bounce it.
From this point on, you can configure SpamAssassin in cPanel to:
- Change the subject line to include the word SPAM in it
- Put SPAM messages into a different folder for IMAP users
- Delete messages it thinks are SPAM
You can configure this in cPanel under the SpamAssassin section.
[edit] SpamAssassin Aware Mail Clients
Some mail clients, like Mozilla Thunderbird, (available at http://www.getthunderbird.com/) understand our SpamAssassin header insertions and will mark e-mail messages as SPAM based on this value (or take it into consideration alongside internal checks Thunderbird performs.
[edit] Spam Protection at the Client Level
We encourage our customers to use either a mail client that has a SPAM filter and some sort of virus protection/prevention or a SPAM/Virus filtering security suite. Examples of mail clients that include SPAM protection are Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.
