How can I Stop SPAM?

Sadly this is life on the Internet. I get hundreds of spam emails each day. Most are marked as SPAM and go into my junk email. The remainder I delete as I come across them.

The only way to not get SPAM completely is to not use email. Of course that is not a solution. The only way to drastically reduce the amount of SPAM is to change email addresses and then be very careful to not allow it to get harvested by SPAMMERS. I don’t think this is a viable option either given that people don’t want to tell everyone they know they have a new email address, or change contact info on business cards, letterhead etc.

So that leaves us with trying to manage SPAM in a way that does not interfere too much with our daily lives. How we go about doing this depends on just how aggressive we want to be. A passive management style will result in having to deal with more SPAM manually but less likely that you miss any email messages, some of which may be important. An aggressive management style will trap almost all SPAM but may block emails being sent from legitimate sources. In either case you pick how you want to handle it and then continue to tweak your filter settings so that your management of SPAM manually becomes a lesser task in your daily routine.

The first thing to do is check your SPAM / Junk mail handler on her computer. They have definition files just like anti-virus software does that needs to be kept up to date. Further you need to look at your SPAM rules and verify that anything identified as SPAM goes into a spam/junk mail folder. These first steps will deal with SPAM currently getting to your computer.

Secondly the SPAM tools on the servers Digital Vertebrae provides could be enabled within cPanel. It is really something you need to do as like I said earlier it can take some tweaking and only you know what is legitimate or not. There are two tools available and each operates differently:

BoxTrapper Spam Trap
This is the only one I use. ALL my email messages go here. Only the ones that I have white-listed go through to my email inbox. Basically you have a white list (allowed) and a black list (not allowed). You need to review the Queue (daily ay first) and white list any messages that are legitimate. Once you do this for a given address it will go through without being blocked. Senders get an auto-reply that a spam trap is being used. In that reply is a link they can click that verifies them as a legitimate sender (bulk spam senders can’t/won’t do this) and will remove the message from the queue and send it right to the inbox. There are full instructions here: http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cpanel/cp11/Mail/Email_Verification_(BoxTrapper).htm

Spam Assassin
This tool looks at the email message, subject, from and headers and applies an algorithm to it to discern whether or not it is SPAM. You can have the assassin automatically delete any message it feels is SPAM or it can add SPAM to the subject line and then deliver it. You can then add an email filter in cPanel that can place any email with SPAM in the subject line in a SPAM email folder. More likely you would do this on your own computer with your current SPAM filter. Otherwise you would need to go into to webmail via cPanel to review the contents of the SPAM filter to ensure assassin was handling the messages correctly. More on Spam Assassin here: http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cpanel/cp11/Mail/Filtering_Spam_(SpamAssassin).htm

NOTE: You can use either of the above but not both at the same time!!!