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How to set up Spam Assassin

Spam Assassin is now installed and working on the server. It takes a little getting used to and a little work to get it to learn what is spam and what is ham.  Ham is good mail.

Spam Assassin is set up for every mail name separately.  You train spam assassin for every mail name and set up personal white and black lists for each mail name as well. So what you do to one email account doesn't affect other email accounts even in the same domain name.

There is a Global whitelist and global blacklist, but there is very little in them except my email address so it can't get blocked when I email you as a client. 

The filter works on 2 principles. With a Hit number and a Bayesian Filter.  When you first use the filter there are standard built in filters that give an email hits. If the hit totals exceed the number you set, the email is considered spam. Positive numbers are spam filters and negative numbers are ham filters. Though there are only few ham filters in the package.

After you classify 200 emails as spam and 200 emails as ham, the Bayesian filter starts working, learning from which mails you mark spam & which you mark ham in the Training page.

VERY IMPORTANT (if you skim this part and you might as well not use the filter!) :  When Training your Bayesian Filter, be careful what you classify spam and ham.  Don't just use your personal preferences on mail you don't want to get, but be sure it's really spam. And example of what not to mark spam is an email from a mail list you signed up with but no longer like. Go unsubscribe. And don't mark a link request from someone you don't like or is sending you one a week, as you should blacklist their email address instead. Since the format of these types of messages is a pattern that looks like ham, and you mark it spam, you will pollute your Bayesian filter. You want to mark real unsolicited emails as spam, the ones that come out of no where and fill you mail box with medication, sex, watch and other stupid offers.  If at any time you can't decided if an email is spam or ham, use the forget box to mark the message.  Also you must mark the messages and click ok before you download them or they won't be in the training section for the Bayesian filter to learn.
ALSO!: If you set the filter to delete spam, it's gone forever. There is no place to go get it back or see what it killed. It's gone, good bye, can't see it anymore, actually you never see it, as it's killed when it comes in your mail account.

1) Turn on Spam Assassin: Go to one of your mail name screens and click on the Mail icon. Look at the bottom of that screen and you will see a checkbox to activate Spam Assassin for that mail name. It is labeled Enable spam filtering. Click ok and you are taken back to that specific mail name screen.

2) Set up Spam Assassin: Still in the same mail name screen from above, click on the Spam Assassin icon. 

A) Jump down to Personal settings section.

1.  Please leave Use server wide settings checked. All I do with that is put my web hosting emails in the white list so you always get email from me about the server or your problems.
2. Hits required for spam: The default is 7.  Just about all emails with hit total greater than 7 are spam.  I find that a setting of 5 is the best.  Some good mail will get marked as spam at first at 5, but as you train the Bayesian filter, I found no good mail got marked as spam at 5. 
3. What to do with spam mail: Stick with the default of Mark as spam and store in mailbox checked. Until you are very very very very very sure you have your Bayesian filter set correctly and have your hits at the right number, don't tell it to delete spam. Why? Because it doesn't save deleted mail, it's gone forever!
4. Modify spam mail subject: I suggest leaving this check box marked. But I also suggest in changing the default message added to the subject line of spam to [SPAM] which is the industry wide default setting (again Plesk does something not standard). 
   In addition there is a secret setting. If you check Mark as spam and store in mailbox but uncheck Modify spam mail subject check box.  Then the subject is not changed, but spam lines are added to the header of the email if you are into some fancy filtering in your email client and don't want to pollute the subject line of spam (like they don't deserve it!).

2) Black List & White List: Here you can add email addresses that you wish to always include (white list) or always exclude (black list). These steps are just a matter of entering an email address and hitting Add or highlighting one and hitting Remove.  Wild cards are accepted.  For example one of my favorite wild cards for my black lists is paypal@* which blacklists any email from paypal@anythingatall.anytld
You blacklist or white list an entire domain with *@somedomain.com, which will include anynameatall@somedomain.com. A broader use of wild cards is another favorite of mine *confirm@*, which includes any email address at all that contains the phrase "confirm" as the user part of an email address. Phishing scammers love to use things like aw-confirm@ebay.com or confirm@paypal.com and this one catches them all!  Be creative, but be careful, as wild cards are powerful.

3) Training the Bayesian Filter: Now comes the fun part. It's not hard, just gets a little time consuming, and again, it must be done for every mail name. This training is not universal. This is a good reason to use aliases to point to one real mail name. Not only do you only have to check only one mail account, but the filters work then across all the aliases for that mail name. 

1. Before you download your mail, log into Plesk and go to one of your domains (some of you only have one domain). Click on the Mail Icon for that domain.  
2. Then on the new screen you see the list of mailboxes for that domain at the bottom of the screen.  Before each mail name you see some tiny icons labeled L B R G A S AV. These are shortcuts to the functions in that mail name (saves a click). If Spam Assassin is turned on for a mail name the little icon under the S (spam) is in color and not grayed out. Click on this little icon jumps you straight to the Spam Assassin screen for that mail name. (this trick works to jump straight to the other functions of the mailbox also).  
3. On the Spam Assassin screen for that mail name, Click on the Training Icon.
4. Then mark your email in your account as spam, ham or forget.
5. Click OK at the bottom of the screen. Wait till it finishes before you download your mail with your email program.
6. Done!

Additional Resources: I have a nice blacklist of typical spammers email patterns that can be obtained by emailing me.  Also I have about 300 spam messages saved that I can send to you so you can train your Bayesian filter very rapidly.  You can just forward yourself ham message to train the filter by just sending about 200 saved good mails back to yourself!  It works better the more ham you send yourself. 500 to 1000 good ham messages will set the filter correctly to email you typically receive. You can have it all trained in less than an hour. You will just get tired going thru hundreds of spams and hams marking them in the training section, but it really works well once trained.