Anti-Spam How-To

Your hosting account comes with a number of anti-spam measures, including SpamAssassin.  This page will detail the use of SpamAssassin....

What is SpamAssassin?


SpamAssassin is a very effective server-side spam filter that you can enable for all email coming in through your domain. You can use SpamAssassin to perform any of three options:
  1. Rewrite the subject line of emails identified as spam to include "**SPAM**" at the beginning of the subject line, making it easy for you to create a filtering rule for your e-mail program
  2. Delete all email identified as spam
  3. Reroute all email identified as spam to a special folder on the server, known as the "SpamBox"
Option 1 (subject rewriting) is useful, but the spam is still delivered to your email program (or webmail), and so may not be suited to people who don't know how to set up filtering rules in their email program, or people whose email program doesn't support filtering rules (such as webmail).

Option 2 (deleting) is the simplest, but regular emails may sometimes be identified as spam, and would then be deleted, and you would have no way of ever retrieving them.

Option 3 (SpamBox) is thus probably the most effective solution for minimising the amount of spam in your inbox - but it does require some (non-technical) setting up and regular checking.

Setting up SpamBox


If you have a Virtual Creations "Full Service" hosting account, please contact us and we will do this for you.

If you have a Virtual Creations "Self-Managed" hosting account, you'll need to do this yourself.
Here's how to set up SpamBox for your system:
Note:  The steps you follow here affect all the email accounts in your hosting account - not just your own single email address.  This is particularly important in the maintenance of your spam (see below).
  1. Log into your Control Panel (typically found at http://www.YOURDOMAIN.COM/cpanel).  For full instructions on logging into your Control Panel, please see our Hosting Account Information page.
  2. Once logged into your Control Panel, click on the SpamAssassin icon in the Mail section.
  3. If SpamAssassin is currently disabled, then click the Enable SpamAssassin button.
  4. When the page loads telling you that SpamAssassin is now enabled, click the Go Back link.
  5. Scroll down to the Spam Box section
  6. If Spam Box is currently disabled, then click the Enable Spam Box button

Spam Maintenance


Enabling the SpamBox will filter all emails identified as spam to a special "spam" folder in your email account.
Note:  If you receive a lot of spam, this folder can rapidly accumulate a lot of messages and you can easily reach your email account's quota.  Once that happens, no further email will be delivered to your account until you free up some space.

In order to remove the spam from the spam folder, you have two options:
  1. Configure your email program (such as Outlook) to collect all the spam
  2. Log into your webmail and manually delete all the spam
You may wonder why option 1 would ever be used.  What would be the point of setting up the SpamBox facility at all if you're just going to have all your spam delivered to your Outlook anyway?  Well, it can be very useful, especially for people who regularly are on the road and check their email via webmail or via their PDA (such as a Blackberry, etc).  These people will find that very little spam makes it to their webmail or PDA - they only ever see the spam when they're back in their office running their email program - which can problably be set up to filter out emails with *** SPAM *** in their subject.

If you wish to use option 1, then you need to create another email account in your email program (such as Outlook).  This new account will be identical in every way to the original email account, except that the username will have "/spam" added to the end (e.g. mark@virtualcreations.com.au/spam).  The password will be the same.  For more information on setting up email accounts in Outlook, please see our Hosting Account Information page.

If you wish delete the spam manually (option 2), then you'll need to do the following on a regular basis:
  1. Log into your webmail account (for more information on how to do this, please see our Hosting Account Information page)
  2. Once logged in, click on the Horde icon (this will not work in Squirrelmail)
  3. When you're in the Horde system, click on Mail
  4. If any spam has been collected so far, you will see a new spam folder.  The folder will not be there if SpamBox has not yet identified any emails as spam.  Click on the spam folder
  5. Select the messages that are spam and delete them.  Note that once deleted, they stay in the folder with a line through them.  This means that they are not truly deleted - only marked as deleted.  In order to completely delete them, you must then click on the Purge Deleted link in the top-right corner of the screen.
  6. Any remaining non-spam messages should be moved to the Inbox.