Spam is the common name for unsolicited commercial email. Any email containing non-personalized or identical information, that is sent to multiple recipients who did not request to receive it is considered spam. In common terms, spam is the junk email that clutters your inbox and wastes your time and resources.

SpamAssassin is an advanced filtering program that you may enable on your hosting account. It uses a wide range of tests on the headers and body of emails to determine if they are spam. SpamAssassin uses a flexible design that allows you to control its rules, filter settings, and actions.

SpamAssassin uses a "point" based system for determining whether a particular email is spam. Every email is scanned for specific triggers. These triggers are worth varying amounts of points depending on their severity. SpamAssassin tallies the points of each email, and if this total is above your specified limit, the email is marked with a *****SPAM***** flag in its subject.

SpamAssassin uses a rule base with hundreds of triggers. This rule base has three categories:

• Header Analysis: spammers often forge return addresses, and add bogus entries to the headers of their emails. This is done both to fool you into thinking that the email is valid, and to make it harder to determine the actual source of the email. Spam Assassin knows what to look for in these headers, and can quickly identify false, invalid, or misleading information.
  
  
• Text Analysis: spam emails often have characteristic styles, phrases, and disclaimers in them. SpamAssassin attempts to spot some of these clues.
  
  
• Blacklists: SpamAssassin compares each email to the lists maintained on major Real Time Blacklist servers (RBLs). If an email is sent from a domain or server in one of these blacklists, there is a good possibility that it is spam.
  
  
  

SpamAssassin does not require you to install anything on your computer. It runs completely on our servers, scanning all emails that are recieved to your domain. Therefore, having SpamAssassin enabled on your account will not use your own computer's resources or effect its performance. Enabling SpamAssassin on your account is as easy as the click of a button. Once the proper SpamAssassin package has been installed on your account, you can enable and disable it from your account's Control Panel.

No. We do not intend to censor our customer's email accounts. The SpamAssassin filter is enabled only to identify possible spam emails. What happens to these flagged emails is up to you. Users often setup message rules with their email clients to delete or forward suspected spam. Even if an email is recieved from a sender on your Black List, that email will be automatically flagged as spam, but will never be automatically deleted.

SpamAssassin is a completely automated process that acts without any human intervention. It scans the body and headers of your emails only once, looking for indications that it may be spam. SpamAssassin does not log or store any of the information it scans from your emails, and no one has access to the information as it is scanned. Therefore, your privacy is absolutely maintained, and any confidential, personal, or otherwise private information will remain unseen.

No. SpamAssassin is designed to focus entirely on filtering spam. The task of identifying spam is very complicated and resource intensive. Adding virus detection to SpamAssassin would create an intense demand on system resources, and slow down the filtering process considerably. To avoid long delays in receiving your emails, SpamAssassin is devoted to only filtering for spam.

However, our email servers are configured to scan all incoming emails for viruses before they are allowed onto our servers. While it is not possible to filter out every virus that is recieved, we take every possible precaution to limit the amount of virus emails that enter our system.

To minimize your risk of contracting a virus, we strongly recomend all of our customers have anti-virus software installed on their computers. Be sure to keep your anti-virus software updated regularly as new viruses are encountered on a daily basis.

You do. In your control panel, you have access to the filter's sensitivity along with a number of other configuration options. Here, you may set the filter to be as strict or as lenient as you wish and configure other options such as the location of reports, conversion of HTML, and custom filter rules.

The SpamAssassin Standard Package comes pre-installed on your account. If you require one of the more advanced "Gold" or "Platinum" packages, contact us. Once an appropriate package has been installed on your account, go to the "Spam Assassin" section of your website's Control Panel. From here you can enable your SpamAssassin filter by selecting "on" and clicking the "Apply" button. When the configuration options appear on the screen, you know that SpamAssassin is fully enabled on your account.

The Filter Sensitivity determines how strict your SpamAssassin filter will be. Specifically, the sensitivity ranges from 2 to 12. Each email that passes through the filter is given a "score" based on the number of triggers it contains. When this score reaches your sensitivity value, then SpamAssassin will flag it as spam (*****SPAM*****). The lower your sensitivity value is, the stricter the filter will become.

At a setting of 2, nearly all spam emails will be caught, however, this setting will be so strict that legitimate emails could possibly be mistaken for spam.

At a setting of 12, your filter will catch only the most obvious spam emails while allowing more well-concealed ones through.

It is recommended that you select a level somewhere in the middle. Adjust your filter sensitivity up and down depending on the amount of spam you recieve.

SpamAssassin generates a spam report for each email that it filters. This report contains each rule that the email triggered, and its corresponding score. This way, you can see a breakdown of the total scoring for the email and can find out exactly why it was flagged as spam.

In the "Spam Assassin" section of your Control Panel, you can customize the filter to place its spam report in either the headers, or the body of each flagged (spam) email. By default, the reports will be placed in the headers of the email. To view these reports, you must instruct your email client to view the header information of the email. This process is different for each email client.

If you wish to view the reports in the body of the email, select this option and click the "Apply" button found below it. With this configuration, SpamAssassin will place its full spam report in the body of the email above the original text. Emails that are not flagged as spam will not have these reports placed in their bodies, and will remain unchanged.

By default, SpamAssassin automatically converts spam HTML emails into plain text. This is done to prevent your email client from unknowingly running malicious JavaScripts, or "web-bugs" that may be hidden in the HTML. This plain-text conversion may make some HTML emails unreadable. Therefore, if you are worried about having a legimate HTML email flagged as spam and made unreadable, you should diable this feature.

To disable the HTML conversion feature, from the "SpamAssassin" section of your Control Panel, select "Leave HTML emails alone", and click the "Apply" button immediately below.

To re-enable HTML conversion, select the "Remove potentialy dangerous HTML from suspected spam" option and click "Apply".

From the "SpamAssassin" section of your control panel, you can create custom filter rules that specify your White and Black Lists.

Your White List is a list of the addresses and domains that you want to always recieve emails from. When you place an address or domain on your White List, SpamAssassin will not attempt to filter any emails originating from it. Emails from your White List bypass SpamAssassin and go directly to your normal mailbox.

Your Black List is a list of the addresses and domains that you do not want to recieve anything from. Place on your Black List, the email addresses and domains that you are absolutely sure are sending you spam. This way, SpamAssassin will not waste time and resources evaluating each individual email it recieves from a member of the Black List. Instead, it will automatically reject any Black List emails it recieves.


To Add a Rule, first select the Action to be performed from the "Add Rule" section. For a White List rule, select "Accept Mail From" as the action, for Black List, select "Reject Mail From". In the middle field, enter the email address, domain name, or general pattern you would like this rule to apply to.

The asterisk [*] is used as a "wild card" for greater flexibility. For example:

• thatisp.com applies to every address at the domain "thatisp.com" as well as "abcthatisp.com"
  
  
• *@thatisp.com applies to every address at the domain "thatisp.com"



• *@*.thatisp.com applies to every address at any sub-domain of "thatisp.com"

Once you have finished, click the "Add Rule" button to enable your new rule.

To disable the SpamAssassin feature on your account, go to the "SpamAssassin" section of your Control Panel. The first option available to you on this page is to disable spam filtering. Simply select "Off" and click the "Apply" button. If you would like to permanently remove an advanced SpamAsssassin filtering package from your account, please contact us.

Normally, SpamAssassin will only flag an email as spam, it will not alter any information contained in the body or the message. However, there are two ways in which your configuration of SpamAssassin may alter the content of spam emails:

• SpamAssassin can be configured to turn any HTML in a flagged spam email into plain text. This feature is useful because spam emails can sometimes use HTML that runs malicious JavaScript code, or contains "web-bugs". The choice to convert HTML to plain text is up to you and can be configured from your SpamAssassin Manager. Converting HTML to plain text will alter the layout of the email and may cause some HTML emails to become unreadable.



• You may configure SpamAssassin to place a spam report in the body of flagged emails. This option places the report in text form above the acutal body of the email. If the email happened to be in HTML, this added text may cause it to become unreadable by you email client.

The reason for converting HTML to plain text is that spammers often use HTML to hide and run malicious JavaScripts and "web-bugs". Malicious JavaScript contained in spam HTML could report back to the spammer a wide variety of information about you, and may also run processes that damage or compromise your system. "Web-bugs" are graphics that are included in the email that are configured to monitor who is reading it. They are usually invisible, and can collect a great deal of information about the person who accidentally activates them. Since SpamAssassin works on the server side, this malicious HTML code is converted to harmless plain-text before it is sent to your inbox. This prevents your email client from accidentally running any embedded JavaScripts or "web-bugs".

No. While the vast majority of flagged emails will be correctly labelled as spam, it is not possible for a computer to be 100% accurate every time. If you immediately delete all flagged email, you run the risk of losing legitimate emails that were mistaken for spam. This risk increases as the sensitivity of your filter increases. When you make your filter too strict, legitimate email is more likely to be mistaken for spam.

The best solution to this is to create a special folder or mailbox for handling all of your flagged emails. This way, your regular inbox will not become cluttered with spam messages, but you will not risk losing legitimate emails. Simply scan this special mailbox on a less frequent basis to make sure that you haven't missed any legitimate emails.

Testing with SpamAssassin has shown that it is accurate roughly 95% of the time. This means that at least 95% of the spam emails you would normally receive will be filtered. No anti-spam software conceived is ever 100% accurate, and the 5% margin is caused by very sneaky and ingenious spammers. Spam emails that slip through the filter are called "false negatives". By creating white and black lists, you can help SpamAssassin improve its accuracy and performance even further.

No. SpamAssassin only filters email being sent to (not from) your inbox. However, this does not mean that sending spam is allowed or encouraged on our servers. According to our Terms and Conditions, spamming is an abuse of our resources and will result in the cancellation of your account.

SpamAssassin employs an advanced Auto-White Listing feature that learns from the emails you recieve. Over time, this feature allows SpamAssassin to develop a more effective filter customized to the types of emails it sees. It works by keeping track of the addresses that send legitimate emails. If a specific address has sent you a legitimate (or low scoring) email in the past, then future emails from that address will automatically have their scores reduced. As you recieve more and more legitimate email from the address, its score will be reduced each time. Thus, over time all of the addresses you recieve legitimate emails from will have their scores reduced in this way. This will allow you to increase the sensitivity of your filter without the risk of having legitimate emails accidentally flagged as spam. Auto-White Listing allows your filter to evolve and adapt to the nature of the email that you recieve and improves its ability to target and eliminate spam.