How does the HostPC spam filtering really work?

[edmicman]

Is there a tutorial or details about how all the different spam blocking/filtering that hostpc offers works?

I have my own email, plus offered addresses to a handful of friends and family. I didn't really care for the provided webmail interfaces (squirrelmail, ubiwebmail(sp?), etc.) so I installed my own 3rd party PHP IMAP client (Ilohamail) and encouraged my users to use that.

However, I've been hearing of more and more spam troubles from my users, and I occasionally get a handful, but not much. My fiance seems to get a lot from her old school address which she has forwarding to her account that I host.

Now, I've enabled SpamAssassin in DirectAdmin, and set it to go to a spam folder. I added the extra spam filter (SpamCop?) onto my account. And I've used the DA spam filter settings to add some common addresses and phrases I was getting before. But what else could/should I and my users be doing? I see in squirrelmail there are a lot more options than last time I checked. Is there something where each user can customize spam solutions to their own? Is that how the spamcop option in squirrelmail works? What about the spam filters options in there? Does all that only work from within squirrelmail? Should I suggest my users move back to squirrelmail?

Any insight would be appreciated. I can contact the helpdesk with specific account questions, but I thought some of these might help others, too. Thanks!

[admin]

IMHO, and I hate to bash DA about anything, but their built in spam filters suck. Period.

Spamassasin is a great addition, our enhanced spam blocker even better. That being said, spammers are getting more creative every day... spam still slips thru using spamblocker, but lemme tell ya, I went from thousands of emails a day to just a few hundred - 99% legitimate.

[edmicman]

Thanks for the reply! Between all the solutions available, plus being pretty careful with my address, I don't really seem to get all that much. Mainly I was wondering if there were tools available that I wasn't fully utilizing. I don't know if there's a good overall solution, anyway. At my old work we use(d) SpamAssassin hosted inhouse, with a shared network folder we could move any spam that it didn't catch to so it could "learn". They switched ISPs to ATT (from SBC I think) and the spam has exploded. Nothing changed except ISPs, but whereas I'd get 1-2 a week max (sometimes none a week) I'm getting 3-4 daily now. Sigh.....

Anyway, thanks for the info!

[Sean]

I wish I only got 3-4 a day..lol.

But I found that using SpamBlocker and SA definitely cuts down dramatically. But nothing is perfect and in order to not catch legit mail, you can only filter so much. Even bayesian spam filters are not as effective anymore.

Spam is a war. For every defense, they come up with an new offense. While some offensive actions have been taken on the governments part, it's just not enough. Over 60% of email is spam. Email is quickly becoming a useless tool IMHO and soon will be obsoleted. Personally, I favor the death penalty for spammers.

[mehmehmeh]

I posted a message about this in my own thread but i got no responses.

1. Is there anyway to use my own ruleset for SA (not custom threshold but just basic header rules)

2. If I pay for the advanced spam filtering what does that get me?

I understand that I can't eliminate spam but after switching over to hostpc the ammount of spam that gets to my mailbox has gone up over 10 fold.