Configure Spam Controls
As with most mail hosts, nearly 90% of all mail traffic moving through Birdhouse is spam.
Spam control on Birdhouse is handled by the excellent SpamAssassin toolkit. In addition, we use Vipul’s Razor to build a database of what other hosting services are ranking as spam.
By setting up your SpamAssassin configuration appropriately, you can reduce your spam load by more than 90% at the server level, so it never reaches your inbox.
By default, new accounts have spam controls enabled. You have complete, per-domain control over spam settings, and can also create mail filters tailored to specific mailboxes on your domain.
To configure SpamAssassin, find its icon in the Mail section of your cPanel interface:
The controls are pretty straightforward. By default you’ll find that spam ranked 5 or higher is auto-deleted. You can change this threshold, or disable auto-deletion altogether (not recommended).
If you feel like too much spam is arriving in your inbox, make sure Auto-Delete is enabled on this page, and try setting it to a lower threshold. But be aware that auto-delete could in some rare cases delete legitimate messages, so handle with care. If you’re concerned about this, see the “Using Spambox” section below.
Using Spam Box
If you don’t feel comfortable using the Auto-delete feature, consider using the Spambox feature instead. When you enable this option, spam will be moved to a “spam” folder on the server instead. You can periodically check this box via webmail or with your favorite IMAP email application. Note that the Spam box will automatically delete all suspected spam older than 30 days, or you can empty it manually by clicking the Clear Spambox button, or by simply deleting spam from your favorite IMAP client or via webmail.
Blacklist / Whitelist
You can use SpamAssassin to whitelist or blacklist addresses or entire domains, so that messages from those addresses will always/never be considered spam. Click the “Configure SpamAssassin” button to enter addresses or entire domains that you always/never want delivered. Domains should be entered like this:
*@domain.com
User-level filters
You can also create custom server-side filters that apply either to your entire domain or to specific mailboxes. These can be used to do things like copying mail from certain senders to a separate mailbox, auto-discarding mail from certain senders, or even piping certain messages to a perl script or program.
Look for the User-Level Filtering or Account-Level Filtering icons in the Mail section of cPanel. Account filters operate on every address under your domain, while User filters operate only on a single mailbox.
Creating filters is fairly straightforward and should be familiar to anyone who has created client-side mail filters before.
Client-Side Spam Management
If you don’t want the server to auto-delete your spam, you can disable the option on the server and then handle spam in your mail client by using “Rules” or “Filters.” Suspected spam that is still set for delivery to your inbox will have a “***SPAM*** ” string pre-pended to the subject line. Configure your email application to look for this string in subject lines and move suspected messages to a separate mailbox.
We do NOT recommend relying exclusively on client-side filtering – the spam volume is just too great. Most users get best results with a combination of server-side and client-side spam filtering.
