Setting Up Spam Filtering and Lists

[Mike]

Here is a great, and concise instruction on using spam filtering and lists. Thanks to Adrian - one of our super Linux techs!

Dspam is the new Spam Filter Go into a mailname in Plesk and then Mailbox and click on the checkbox next to "Enable spam filtering" and then go to Spam Filter -> Training (the Spam Filter button will appear in the main mailname page).

To be effective you have to train it with at least 10 spams and 10 hams (ham means non-spam email).

In the training section there's an icon on the right of each mail:

- gray means the email was not scanned by dspam
- green means it was scanned and identified as ham
- red means it was scanned and identified as spam

You just need to select the ones that are ham (and click "this is not
spam") and the same with spam.

If case of false positive after the initial training is done (ie. a spam
was identified as ham or a ham was identified as spam), you must come
back to the training and select that particular mail and tell dspam what it is. Remember, the more you train it, the more accurate it becomes and in the end it should never make a mistake as it's very intelligent.

Also the black/white list feature in plesk works. You also put * in
there, ie:

*@yahoo.com
info@*
sales@*nexus*

The only feature that doesn't work is the scoring in Plesk so please ignore that and concentrate on the scoring and whitelists and blacklists. Many thanks for your patience on this.


- Mike

[AOHost]

Thank you for the information.

When do you expect to deploy the scoring-based SPAM filtering? I took a look at the training based-filtering and I can see that it will be simply too time-consuming and problematic for me to set up for all my clients.

Time consuming because:

- most of my client's pop email accounts are set to poll and remove mail immediately. In order to do the training, I would have to modify all the mail clients on all the computers at all of my clients to leave mail on the server.

- I will have to train clients to log into the web interface to do the training and then field their inevitable questions about using the blacklist/whitelists.

Problematic because:

- leaving mail on the server will increase the storage requirements for my reseller accounts, some of whom receive very large report attachments daily which if left on the server could cause storage quotas to be exceeded.

The standard SpamAssasim scoring-based spam filtering does not engender the above problems. I'm hoping HN has a timetable for rolling out the scoring-based filtering and will stick by it.

[islandroutes]

Thanks Mike. I'll be working on remembering to train my email.

[BillSamuel]

I can see that the spam filter is working. As it is working now, it adds 32 extra header lines to each and every message. Is there any way to suppress these? I like the filtering, but I don't like having a page of headers.

[johnquest]

Don't know if this is related to the SA install but I can't login to horde. I get a login failed message. Squirrel mail works fine.

[RobbieLePommie]

I doubt it's connected. Probably that one is fussy about "case" where the other isn't?

I'd raise a trouble ticket with this one.

[Russ]

I'm combing the forum but am still confused. Is spam filtering enabled on all servers presently? I don;t see the check box in my plesk panel.

Do you handle the training through the horde webmail interface?

[NexDog]

Nopes, in Plesk. In a mailname go into Mailbox and enable it first.

[NexDog]

Originally Posted by AOHost

Thank you for the information.

When do you expect to deploy the scoring-based SPAM filtering? I took a look at the training based-filtering and I can see that it will be simply too time-consuming and problematic for me to set up for all my clients.

Time consuming because:

- most of my client's pop email accounts are set to poll and remove mail immediately. In order to do the training, I would have to modify all the mail clients on all the computers at all of my clients to leave mail on the server.

- I will have to train clients to log into the web interface to do the training and then field their inevitable questions about using the blacklist/whitelists.

Problematic because:

- leaving mail on the server will increase the storage requirements for my reseller accounts, some of whom receive very large report attachments daily which if left on the server could cause storage quotas to be exceeded.

The standard SpamAssasim scoring-based spam filtering does not engender the above problems. I'm hoping HN has a timetable for rolling out the scoring-based filtering and will stick by it.

There will be no score-based system. If there was we'd use the one that comes with Plesk but as server performance is of paramount performance we can't use it. Otherwise you'd be saying "Why is the server so slow". :p

Just tell your clients to train before they download mail? I'll ask Adrian is dspam keeps all received mail in its db regardless of whether it was downloaded.

[Russ]

How do my clients white or black list their emails. Do they do it via horde or can they get limited access to the PLESK spam interface.

Thanks,
Russ