DevX Studio Blog

What is Spam Assassin ?

What is Spam Assassin? The Spam Assassin system is software for analyzing email messages, determining how likely they are to be spam, and reporting its conclusions. It is a rule-based system that compares different parts of email messages with a large set of rules. Each rule adds or removes points from a message’s spam score. A message with a high enough score is reported to be spam.Spam Assassin is a e-mail spam filtering system that sits side by side with account with us to help block, mark or filter out mail you don’t want.
How do I access Spam Assassin?

First thing you will want to do is log into your cPanel. From there, under the “Mail” box look at the nine a link that reads “Spam Assassin”. From here it will tell you if Spam Assassin is currently enabled or disabled. Clicking the boxes to enable or disable Spam Assassin is how you can turn it on or off. To configure the Spam Assassin settings click the button that reads: “Configure Spam Assassin (required to rewrite subjects)”
How do I configure Spam Assassin?

If you do not know what it is you are looking at, the next screen could be a little confusing. To help you understand here’s a break down of what you should see on the screen and what do do with it:
required_hits - The number of e-mails received before marked as spam.rewrite_subject - The tells Spam Assassin if it should rewrite your subject line or not as you define. (1 is yes and 0 is no)

subject_tag - What the spam is marked with in the subject line. (usually ***SPAM*** or something else that could be picked up by your own mail filters on your mail client of choice)

blacklist_from - An e-mail address you definitely want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address filtered)

whitelist_from - An e-mail address you definitely do NOT want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address NOT filtered)
Once you’re done, just hit save and whatever you defined on the earlier page will now be in effect. If you picked to rewrite the subject, then you could now go into your mail client and write a new “rule” that would filter all mail with “***SPAM***” to go into a SPAM folder so that you could check it from time to time making sure you did not get any false positives.

How do I use the Spam Box?

You can turn your spam box enable and disable from the same page as Spam Assassin. It’s just that easy! With the recent upgrades to cPanel, the TotalChoice Hosting team has been paying more attention to the users of Spam Assassin.
In the previous build you would need to use a imap client to get to your spam box.

Well not anymore. You can create a “new” e-mail account that has precisely the same settings as your e-mail account, but add: “/spam” to the end of the e-mail account user name. This will retrieve only your Spam box mail.
In order for this to be useful, you will want to set up your e-mail client to deliver this Spam Box mail to a special folder (perhaps called spam?) automatically.

Add comment January 15th, 2007

Stop comment spam.

Comment Spamming is one of the major problem faced by all the blog owners. Spammers are not interested to redirect your traffic but are trying to increase their (or their client’s ) search engine ranking. By leaving comments on your site, the spammers’ sites can achieve a slightly higher search engine ranking.Spammers don’t want to degrade your site but they just want to get people to their sites and make a larger profit.

How to tackle this comment spamming ?

*) Don’t ban specific IP address :

Once you got the spammer’s IP address you would normally banned it, but it rarely helps you much as most comment-spammers make use of ‘open proxies ’ using which they have their spam comments, so you never be able to eradicate them from your site.

*) Don’t allow to insert HTML code.

Spammers generally attack your site if you provide them any source for getting into your site such as inserting some html code or anything like that.
If you feel the need to allow the user to include links, there are a number of ways by which you can provide them this functionality, without making your site vulnerable to attack. The most common method is to inform the user that all URLs will be converted to links automatically, then convert any content that starts with http:// to a link.

*) Use Non-Descriptive Form Names.

Good programming requires the use of descriptive names, but in avoiding comment spam, you should stay away from names that describe a form’s fields. Form element names like “Comment” make it too easy for spammers to access your comment system.

*) Use rel=”nofollow” for All Links.

For any reason, you want to allow your visitor to include links in their comments, then don’t forget to add rel=”nofollow” tag, doing so you informs search engines bots to ignore the link, so the spammer gains no benefit from adding links in their comments.

Add comment January 15th, 2007