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Sunday 30 March 2014

Email Spam Filtering

Email Spam Filtering

By default, Kloxo’s spam filtering capabilities are not configured to reduce spam messages. You will need to make some changes to make it work for you and your clients.

When you configure your first email addresses you will notice that a lot of the email you get will be marked as spam, by spamdyke adding ******SPAM****** to the email subject. By sending all email to your inbox, marked or not, it gives you an opportunity to see which good messages are false positives and how much spam is getting through.

The first step is to redirect email marked as spam to the spam folder. Do that by going to the Kloxo panel, select the Mail Accounts tab, then go to the email account Kloxo panel by clicking on the email account name. Click the Filter Config icon. Change “What To Do With Spam” to spambox, then click update.

Now return to the email account Kloxo panel and click the Spam Training icon. You will see the messages judged as spam listed in that page. If you see any good messages in that list you should click the box next to the message then click the “train as ham” button (spam=bad, ham=good). If you train a message as ham, any future messages from the same sender should not be marked as spam. You will want to monitor the messages marked as spam for a few days to make sure good messages aren’t being tossed.

Hint: If you are logged-in as admin you will also see buttons for Train As System Spam & Ham. If you use those buttons it will whitelist & blacklist messages for the entire system, rather than for individual email accounts.

Another Hint: Login to RoundCube to view good messages that landed in the spam folder. You may need to “subscribe” to the Junk folder in RoundCube settings to view the spam folder.

One More Hint: You will notice a tab in the Spam Training icon called Clear Spam Db. That’s not really a tab, it’s a command that wipes-out all of your spam/ham training entries. If you click on that tab it will delete all training entries for that email account without so much as a confirmation. Don’t click on that tab unless you have a compelling reason to do so.

You can adjust the level of spam filtering by going to the domain’s Kloxo panel and clicking the Spam Status icon. The default is 5. Setting it to a lower number will mark more email as spam, and setting it higher will mark less email as spam. I usually set it higher, to maybe 6 or 7, since I don’t want to miss any messages. We will be blocking most of the spam with DNS blacklists anyway.
DNS blacklists will turn away a lot of spam before it reaches filtering. These are lists of sending servers that have been blacklisted for spamming. Once you subscribe to DNS blacklists, any email received from rogue sending servers will be deleted. Depending on your spam situation, 80% or more of all unsolicited email can be removed by simply subscribing to some major blacklists. To do that, go to the Kloxo admin panel and click the Server Mail Settings icon. Click the Spamdyke tab. In the box at the bottom marked “Space separated DNS RBL servers” enter bl.spamcop.net and zen.spamhaus.org separated by a single space. Click the update button. Those blacklists are free, and are the most well-respected spam authorities.

It’s a good idea to also select Reject Servers Without RDNS Names. There really aren’t any legitimate email servers that don’t have rDNS properly set.
Your spam should be pretty well under control now.

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