From EZP Knowledge Base

SpamAssassin is a tool for identifying and flagging spam email. If you are tired of being offered fake watches, viagra and vip passes to the newest casino like the rest of us, SpamAssassin can help you reduce the garbage in your inbox. What SpamAssassin does by default is mark messages it suspects of being spam with a spam Header. You can read more about SpamAssassin here.

When your account is created by EZProvider, SpamAssassin is turned off. Enabling Spam Assassin is very easy, simply follow these steps:

• Login to cPanel.

• Click the "SpamAssassin" icon.

• Click the "Enable SpamAssassin" button.

Now SpamAssassin will get started tagging your suspected junk mail with it's spam "Header". To disable SpamAssassin, you just need to follow the same steps except the "Enable SpamAssassin" button will be renamed "Disable SpamAssassin" in a very helpful manner.

You can now do one of two things - setup your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) to filter your email based on the SpamAssassin header or tell the server to delete all messages marked as spam. The downside of this is that there is a chance that SpamAssassin will make a mistake and falsely identify a legitimate email as spam (this is called a false positive). So use this feature with caution.

Telling the server to automatically delete suspected spam emails is just as easy as enabling SpamAssassin. Again:

• Login to cPanel.
• Click the "SpamAssassin" icon.
• Under the "Filters" heading, you will see "Spam Auto Delete is Enabled/Disabled" - Depending on which setting is active, to have SpamAssassin auto-delete detected spam messages, set the "Score" to your preferred level and click the "Auto-Delete Spam" button.

If you do this set SpamAssassin to automatically delete messages marked as spam, I would suggest configuring SpamAssassin from it's default setting to something a bit less aggressive. To configure SpamAssassin, simply click the "Configure SpamAssassin" button on the SpamAssassin page within cPanel. This brings you to a page with several options:

• blacklist_from: here you can enter email addresses that are constantly slipping past the SpamAssassin filter and any email from them will automatically be flagged with the spam header.
• required_score: this is an important field. This is the default score setting for when SpamAssassin should flag an email as spam. 5 is default and is quite aggressive, they suggest 8-10 as a more mildly aggressive stance. You can tinker and find the best setting for your comfort level. A higher number here results in a less aggressive spam filtering.
• score: this is something that the vast majority of our users will ignore. I will too, as users who need to set these up will know how to use this already.
• whitelist_from: the exact opposite of the blacklist_from field, this is the place to add your friends email who keeps getting mistakenly flagged as spam (although I'm sure we all have *that* friend who does spam us with joke emails!).

The most important field, imho; is the "score" field. If you are automatically deleting messages flagged as spam by SpamAssassin, you will want this to be set to a higher number then the default 5, perhaps somewhere between 5 and 10. Once you are happy with your settings, click the save button and enjoy a cleaner email inbox.