Nowadays, email spam has become a significant annoyance in day-to-day email communications. You may have seen your mailbox filled with unsolicited bulk electronic messages. These spam emails may contain virus attachments or malicious links that tempt you to visit some random website where you will be asked to buy products, or these websites may deliver malware to your computers.
In this article, we have compiled techniques to reduce the number of unwanted emails that get delivered to your mailbox.
Enable SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a widely used automated filtering system that identifies spam based on message headers and email content. It uses a rule-based scoring system to determine whether an incoming email is legit or spam; an email with a higher score is more likely to be spam.
Note
To prevent legit emails from being rejected, store the spam emails in the Junk/ Spam folder rather than rejecting them straight away.
You can enable SpamAssassin from cPanel by clicking the SpamAssassin icon under the Mail section.
For more information, refer to our article How to Enable SpamAssassin from cPanel.
Filter Emails with Spammy Words
If you can determine spammy words in emails that identify them as spam, you can filter out such emails easily through cPanel's Account level and user-level filtering features.
Refer to our article - Create an Account level and User level filters from cPanel.
Enable Email Authentication from cPanel
cPanel Email Authentication section combines two technologies - DKIM and SPF to reduce spam.
Enable DomainKeys (DKIM)
DomainKeys (DKIM) is an email authentication system that embeds digital signatures in email messages which can be verified using public keys published in the DNS. DKIM ensures that emails are received from the listed senders and that the messages have not been modified during transit.
To enable DKIM, follow these steps –
- Under the Mail section of the cPanel, click on Email Authentication.
- Under DKIM, click Enable.
You can also refer to the video tutorial - Enable the domain key from cPanel.
Enable SPF Authentication
SPF Authentication specifies the authorized email servers to send emails from your domain. It prevents outgoing spam messages and "Spoofing" (forged email appears to be coming from your domain). In addition, SPF prevents spammers from forging messages that impersonate your domain as the sender.
To enable SPF Authentication, refer to the following steps –
- Under the Mail section of the cPanel, click on Email Authentication.
- Under SPF, click Enable.
Changing SPF Advanced Settings
Once you enable SPF authentication, you can add additional IP addresses or mail servers authorized to send an email to your domain.
To change SPF advanced settings, follow these steps –
- Under the Mail section of the cPanel, click Email Authentication.
- Click on the Add button in the respective section to add additional hosts, servers, and IP addresses or include lists to your SPF configuration. Similarly, if you wish to remove hosts, servers, IP addresses, or lists from your SPF configuration, you need to click the Remove button in the respective section.
- To exclude all other domains that are not specifically defined in your configuration, select the All Entry (ALL) check box.
- Select the Overwrite Existing Entries check box to overwrite all existing SPF records.
- Click Update.
Other Useful tips
Spammers can crawl your website to collect email addresses and store them in their system. Hence, displaying your email address on your website is not recommended. When you see a spam email, immediately mark it as Junk or Spam.
Try to avoid registering at unknown websites, which you will never read for the newsletters. If you have already signed up to receive the messages and want to stop receiving them, use the unsubscribe method of the respective website. You can also go for an Anti-Spam solution to reduce incoming spam mail.