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Your Mail Server, Spam and Anti Virus
By admin | December 13, 2007
This post is intended for our Linux hosted clients.
We hate spam as much as everybody else, so we give you the best tools to kill it :-)
Spam Assassin is an award winning, “rules based” spam detector that is already installed on your server. This software has been around for a long time now and has matured into a very stable and reliable product that works very well indeed.
Basically, it works by using a huge table of rules. A team of people sat down and came up with a long list of all the common characteristics of a spam email, and then assigned a particular score to each characteristic. Spam Assassin checks each incoming email and totals up the scores for all rules that the email violates … and, if the total score is above a certain threshold (default value is 5, but you can change it) then that particular email is flagged as possible spam.
This is a simplistic view of how it works.
Handy Note … Knowing the sort of things Spam Assassin looks for is useful for your own internet marketing. You can make sure that you do not violate those rules with your newsletters, etc and thus keep more of your emails out of your clients spam buckets.
If you would like to research it more the home page is at http://spamassassin.apache.org
How to enable Spam Assassin on your server
Spam Assassin is turned off by default on each new server.
If you do not get much junk mail then you do not need to worry. But, if you do get a lot of rubbish, and you wish to stop it, then you will need to switch it on.
To enable it …
- Enter into your server control panel .. which you will find at http://www.your-web-address-goes-here.com/cpanel
- Click once on the “mail” icon.
- Click once on the “SpamAssassin” link.
- If it is currently “disabled” (which you can see in the “current status” box) then click once on the “Enable SpamAssassin” button.
- DONE !!
Spam Assassin is now enabled on your server, and you will see an instant and dramatic decrease in the amount of junk that you receive.
By default it does not delete your spam emails. It inserts a marker into the subject of all flagged emails, and then its up to you deal with them (normally by writing an Outlook Express “message rule” to throw those marked mails into your recycle bin or a spam folder).
False positives are almost non-existent, so personally I rather prefer to delete all spam completely before it gets into my inbox.
To have Spam Assassin automatically DELETE the spam it finds then there is a small link (the link text says “click here”) in the sentence above the “Enable SpamAssassin” button that you must click on. The text color makes the link quite tough to see.
You do not have to change the configuration of Spam Assassin. It is very good in its default install state.
You will also not have to update it. I have already set the server to automatically check for, and install, updates.
So you can just turn it on and then forget about it :-)
Regarding Anti Virus
We have a fully functional anti virus program (Clam AV) running on the server that automatically checks all incoming email.
You do not have to turn this on … its already on.
I have set this anti virus program to automatically check for updates every hour. So the chance of you receiving virus infected email is low.
Please do not rely just on the mail server to find viruses though. It is common-sense computing that everyone maintain an anti virus program on their own PC.
Personally I use AVG Anti Virus on my own PC’s …
- Its free.
- It updates automatically.
- Its very “light” on your PC’s resources
- and … it works very well.
You can grab it at http://free.grisoft.com
I hope you find this post helpful.
If you have any questions about what I have discussed here then please do not hesitate to leave them as comments on this post, or drop me a note.
Have a great day !!
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