Spam appears to be becoming more and more prevalent. The older your domain name, the more spammers seem to have you on their list of recipients. Spammers are also getting better at getting around spam filtering criteria. However, there are a few things you can do to help control the amount of spam that you receive in your inbox.
If you log into your account's cpanel. There are three general areas that you can use to help control the amount of spam you receive.
1. SPAM ASSASSIN
When an email hits your account, spam assassin assigns that email a score. The more 'spam triggers' it finds in the email, the higher the spam score that is assigned to that email.
By default, when you turn spam assassin on, it is set to label any email with a spam score of 5 or higher. If you wish spam assassin to filter out more spam, you could lower this score to 4 or 3. You can do this by clicking the 'Configure Spam Assassin' button inside the spam assassin area of your cpanel. Then adjusting the score at the top of the screen.
You can also set spam assassin to auto delete any email that it considers to be spam by clicking the 'auto delete spam' button inside the spam assassin area of your cpanel. This way your inbox will never see those spam emails. The drop down box below this auto delete button also contains a number. Whatever you set this number at, spam assassin will auto delete any email that has a spam score higher than that number.
With the spam assassin settings, I suggest reducing those numbers slowly and seeing how your email and spam levels are affected. If you reduce the number to much, spam assassin may start filtering out or deleting legitmate email as well.
2. ACCOUNT OR USER LEVEL FILTERING
Another option is to use the 'account level filtering' or 'user level filtering' in the cpanel. Account level filtering creates rules for all the emails in your accounts, user level filtering sets up rules that only apply to a specific email account. Here you can set up rules to move or delete messages that meet the criteria you specify. For example, you could set up a rule that any email that contains the word 'viagara' in the body of the message will automatically be discarded.
3. BOX TRAPPER
Finally, you can also enable box trapper for specific email accounts. Box trapper sends an email back to anyone that sends an email to you asking the sender to verify themselves. Once the sender is verified, they are whitelisted and future emails should go straight through to your inbox. Spammers tend to use fake 'reply' email addresses so when box trapper sends an email to them asking them to verify themselves, they never see that email and never verify themselves, so you never receive their spam. The downside to box trapper is that sometimes the verification email ends up in the senders own spam box so they never see it.
Using some or all of these features should help to reduce the amount of spam you receive.
