How to use the SpamExperts Spam Filter

Your Kualo hosting account includes an enterprise grade spam filtration solution from SpamExperts. This solution retails direct at over $10 / £7.50 per month, and it's made available to you completely free of charge, providing much more resilient spam protection when compare to the free spam filtration tools offered by other web hosts. Spam Experts additionally filters other threats such as most fraudulant/phishing emails and viruses. 

Not only does SpamExperts provide inbound protection so that your inboxes are not fiiled with unwanted junk emails, it also filters emails that go out from the server. This is one of the key benefits - since servers without outbound spam protection can easily become blacklisted if any hosting accounts on it are compromised by a spammer and used to send email. SpamExperts will stop these emails from going out at all, and so you should enjoy great email delivery as well as a spam and virus free inbox!

This article aims to show you how to log in and manage your SpamExperts spam filter, and configure various functionality within it.

This tutorial assumes that you have already successfully logged into cPanel.

1) To access the SpamExperts configuration panel, click the SpamExperts logo in cPanel.

2) Once you have clicked the SpamExperts logo you will be presented with a screen listing your domain along with any Parked and Addon domains that you may have. Click the Login link against the domain you want to manage.

3) Once you have clicked Login, you will be in the SpamExperts domain control panel.

The Dashboard is divided into several sections:

Incoming

Protection Report

Email Restrictions

Whitelist/Blacklist

Incoming

Log Search

Log Search allows you to search all the incoming messages on the account and see how they were assessed by SpamExperts, and if they were rejected, the reason why.

Spam Quarantine

The Spam Quarrantine is where messages that are believed to be spam are stored for 28 days. The spam detection accuracy of SpamExperts is extremely high at 99.98%, so generally you should never need to look in the quarrantine at all. However if you wish you can log in and check what's in there - the most recent spam messages will be displayed at the top, and you can also search through them searching by message subject, sender or recipient.

Delivery Queue

The delivery queue contains messages that are waiting to be delivered to an inbox. You'll see a list of messages and the reason why they have not yet been delivered, and you will also be able to automatically force a delivery. Why might a message not be delivered? Perhaps the inbox was full or the mailserver on the server was momentarily offline - SpamExperts will collect the emails and attempt to redeliver as soon as possible, rather than sending a delivery failure to the person who sent the email.

Domain Settings

Here you can define the maximum number of bounces, turn on/off logging of invalid recipients, define contact details for the domain and set the number of days that logs are kept for (default is 28). 

Domain Statistics

Domain Statistics provides a statistical overview of the types of emails that have been delivered or quarrantined. 

Filter Settings

Here you can control the activation of the quarantine system. If you disable the quarantine system, emails detected as spam will not be kept in the quarantine system but will be delivered to your inbox. You can also set the subject notation that is added to the subject of emails classified as unsure by the filtering system, so that you can either filter them into a spam folder on your local mail client, or otherwise open them with caution.

Report Spam

In the Spampanel web interface we have a "Report Spam" function. You can upload a spam message to train the spamfilter.

It is in a 'drag 'n' drop' style feature meaning you can save the SPAM email to your system, then drag and drop the email into the "Report Spam" area. Note that only emails are accepted that have been processed by the cluster you're reporting to.

Currently only the .eml format is supported. For .msg format you can use the free "Outlook Email client add-on" to report spam which was not correctly blocked by our systems. More information about these can be found here.

If you're using Thunderbird you can also use the free "Mozilla Thunderbird client addon". More information about this addon can be found here.

If your email client is not supported, for example Apple Mail.app, it is possible to report spam by forwarding the spam email(s) as attachment to a special address spamreport@spamrl.com . All messages attached in .eml format will be processed by this system.

Finally it's possible to report spam via our special IMAP system. We have instructions for Thunderbird and Outlook.

Protection Reports

Periodic Protection Report

A daily or weekly report can be generated for each domain (or for specific recipients at a domain) and is delivered via email. Multiple recipients can be separated with a comma. A report can also be generated on-demand from the webinterface.

The report can be sent as a PDF attachment or as inline HTML. The PDF report outlines a summary of the spam and viruses that the filtering service has protected the domain (or address) from receiving, and also includes information about the total volume of mail processed for the said domain.

The PDF report also includes a detailed table (for auditing purposes) of messages that were rejected but not quarantined; this table is configured by default but may be disabled via the web interface - it will be very large for some domains. A similar table is also included of messages that were quarantined, including links to release each message directly.

On Demand Protection Report

The On demand protection report will trigger the creation of the report described above; the actual delivery may take several minutes, depending on the size of the report.

Email Restrictions

Blocked Extensions

The blocked extentions option lets you choose which file extentions you wish to block.  

Recipient Whitelist / Blacklist

To allow the domain administrator to remain in control over the filtering, it's possible to whitelist/blacklist a recipient.

Recipient whitelist

All filtering checks are disabled for whitelisted recipients. We recommend only using the recipient whitelist for exceptional cases such as special abuse@ or postmaster@ recipients.

Recipient blacklist

Emails to recipients listed on the blacklist will be automatically rejected. The messages are NOT quarantined. The messages are rejected with a 5xx SMTP error code, so legitimate sending SMTP servers will generate a bounce message to the sender.

Special usage

To whitelist/blacklist a specific recipient address, the local part of the address should be entered. For example if your domain is mydomain.com and you add nofilter to the recipient whitelist, all emails sent to nofilter@mydomain.com will not be scanned for spam. To whitelist/blacklist all recipients for a domain (so all emails sent to the domain are not scanned/blocked), you can enter the wildcard * for the local part.

Sender Whitelist / Blacklist

To allow the domain administrator to remain in control over the filtering, it's possible to whitelist/blacklist a sender. The check works based on the MAIL FROM provided by the sender at SMTP level, this may be different from the "From:" header in the email. If you check the headers of an email, the "envelope-from" address specifies the actual sender address.

Sender whitelist

All filtering checks are disabled for whitelisted senders. You can whitelist a specific sending email address, or a full sending domain. We recommend only using the sender whitelist if the system would otherwise wrongly block email from a certain sender. Spammers often use fake senders matching the recipient domain, or domains the recipient may have received emails from before, to try and bypass the filtering in that way. In addition, if the system is generally wrongly blocking a sender, you can always contact our customer support so we can research what problem is causing the rejection and resolve that issue.

Sender blacklist

Emails from senders listed on the blacklist will be automatically rejected. The messages are NOT quarantined. The messages are rejected with a 5xx SMTP error code, so legitimate sending SMTP servers will generate a bounce message to the sender.

Special usage

You can whitelist/blacklist a specific sending email address, or a full sending domain. To whitelist/blacklist all senders from a domain, you should only enter the domain (without *@).