If we were paid a nickle for each spam message we receive, many of us would be millionaires. Reality then sets in and most of us realize that only the spammers are getting rich, at our expense. So to fight this, we have a couple of tricks up our sleeves. Aside from offering our users access to Spamassassin, an open source spam filter, we also utilize real-time blackhole lists or simply, RBLs. Let’s run through what both of these mean to the end user.

Running Spamasassin on an account allows our servers to scan each email that comes in and pick out what it thinks is spam. By default, there is a spam level number of 5.0 that must be reached before Spamassassin will ‘do it’s thing’. Each email is scanned for it’s content and depending on what type of message it contains, it tallies everything and sees if it breaks the 5.0 spam level. Different message bodies will trigger different scores. Through the use of our DirectAdmin hosting panel, users are able to raise or lower this spam score level, as well as determine what they want Spamassassin to do with the email once that level is reached. You can tag the subject with a special notation so you can filter it locally on your email client, or just have the system delete the email. All this is available through our hosting panel.

Now keep in mind, Spamassassin is NOT enabled by default. You must log into the hosting panel and enable it on your account. We do this mainly because we want to give the option of filtering to the end user. When you sign up for an account, you expect us to deliver your email. By enabling Spamassassin by default, we are altering that email delivery. So this option will always be disabled by default. To enable it, just go into the hosting panel and click on the ‘Save’ button for Spamassassin. This will activate it for your account.

Our other aid in fighting spam is the use of RBLs. What this does is it checks publicaly available lists of known spammers. If the originating server that the email was sent from is on these lists, they will be bounced back stating which list they are guilty of being on. No email is scanned, if it matches the RBL, it gets rejected immediately. This cuts down on our operating load on our servers, which is a great thing. Sometimes, false positives occur. We will happily whitelist anyone who can prove they are not supposed to be on the RBL(s). The usage of RBLs is not an end user adjustable option. The benefits have far outweighed any inconveniences these RBLs have caused. For more information about the blacklists, visit our spam page that explains how to get yourself whitelisted and what lists we use.

So there you have it, a slight insight into how we do it here.