SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a program installed on our virtual host servers that filters your email for spam based on a pre-defined scoring system. We provide this service free of charge to our customers. It uses a small procmail configuration.

What you'll need:

  • a text editor, such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac). Important: make sure the editor is set to Plain Text mode and not Rich Text mode.
  • an FTP or SFTP client, such as WinSCP (Windows) or Cyberduck (Mac), the same one you used when uploading your website. Note: if you had a third party upload your website, ask them to perform this entire task for you instead.

Here are instructions for getting it activated in your account:

1) Open your text editor.
2a) If you're on one of our newer servers, copy the following and paste it into your editor window:


:0fw
* < 60000
| /usr/bin/spamc

:0e
{
    EXITCODE=77
}

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
$DEFAULT/.Spam/

2b) If you're on one of our older servers, copy the following and paste it into your editor window:


:0fw
* < 60000
| /usr/bin/spamassassin

:0e
{
    EXITCODE=77
}

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
/dev/null

Note: if you're unsure whether or not you're on an older or newer server, please contact support.

3) Save the file as: procmail.txt
4) Connect to your webhosting server via SFTP.
5) Upload the procmail.txt file, and make sure that you use ASCII format when you do so.
6) Once the file is uploaded, rename the file: .procmailrc (note the preceding period; this is very important)
7) You're done! Spamassassin is now installed and will work automatically.

If you've set a procmail.log file within your .procmailrc, you can examine that file for originating email addresses, subjects, file size, and times of the spam receipt:

-----
From terry7567793414v13@budde.com.au  Thu Jul 11 00:13:15 2002
 Subject: *****SPAM***** Here is that link 1594HNsC1--9
  Folder: /dev/null                                                        4748
-----
For detailed information about SpamAssassin, please visit spamassassin.org.

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