How To Filter Email Spam
“Is there anything we can do to filter… errr… ‘enhancement’ email spam? I’ve had over 35 in my inbox this morning!”
Not quite what you want when you’re running a genteel establishment.
I have to admit that I wasn’t totally sure how to solve the problem. I knew that the first thing to do is to mark it as spam so that your email provider knows not to put it into your inbox in future but, because the email was running from the domain and being configured to appear in Outlook, that didn’t seem to be an option. (I have since learned that it is possible to apply spam filters in Outlook)
So, the lovely Alec at eukHost ‘live chatted’ me through the ‘Account Level Filtering’ option in the ‘Mail’ section of the CPanel dashboard for the domain.
You click the button to create a new filter and three boxes appear.
The first offers you the choice of which area of the email you want to check – from, to, subject, body, etc. In this case, because the emails had been deleted and I did not know the subject title, I chose ‘body’.
The second box gives you a series of options like ‘equals’, ‘contains’, ‘does not contain’ so I chose ‘contains’
The third box allows you to put in the word/phrase that you want to check for and the final box gives you the option of what you want to do with any messages containing that word/phrase – for example, save to a directory or to discard completely.
I set up and titled four rules relating to the most obvious words that were causing the problems and then sent an email to the client telling them what I’d done for those four words.
You’re ahead of me aren’t you?
Of course, the new filters meant that that email was automatically deleted, so I had to write a new one explaining the solution without mentioning the offending vocabulary.
Alec warned that great care needed to be taken when setting up filters as, obviously, if it’s done wrong, emails that you might actually want could be deleted without being received.
He also advised that mail should not be set up so that the default address accepts mail for users mailboxes that don’t exist. This means that someone can send to anything@yourcompany.com and you’ll still receive it to inbox@yourcompany.com (where inbox is your Cpanel username). This is how spammers send out mass messages as well as viruses. A common practice between worms, viruses and spammers is to generate or create a false email address they think you’ll receive.
Login to your Cpanel, click on Mail, Default Address, at the bottom click Set Default Address
Select the domain in the drop down menu, I recommend repeating this for all domains listed.
In the to: field – enter
:fail: no such address here
Click on Change to save your changes.
My own CPanel domains were all set to this already but it’s worth checking to protect your own domain.
Suite 1, 103 Leigh Road Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, SS9 1JL UK
info@lollipoplocal.co.uk • 01702 476517
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Tags: email spam
