MANAGING THE SPAM MAIL FILTER SETTINGS

Type in your browser: https://www.yourdomain.com:8443, where “yourdomain” is the name of your domain.
Login to Plesk using your e-mail address and password.
To manage personal spam filtering settings, click Spam Filter.

If the spam filtering functionality is disabled (displayed in grey), it should first be enabled.

To do that:
1. Go to the Mailbox management page
2. Check the Enable spam filtering checkbox
3. Click OK to save changes
You will see the Spam Filter icon become active (displayed in color), meaning that the spam filtering functionality is now available.
In order to recognize a mail message as spam it needs to score a certain amount of hits. The hits are scored according to the internal SpamAssassin settings and based on the contents of the mail messages and its subject. You can change the sensitivity of the spam filter by varying the amount of hits required for marking a message as spam. The more hits are required the less sensitive the filter is, and vice versa – the less hits are required the more sensitive the filter is.
1. The default amount of hits is set to 7. If you wish to change this value, click into the Hits required for spam input box and type in the new value.
2. Click Set to save the changes.
You can choose what to do with the mail recognized as spam: you can choose to either delete it, or to mark it as spam and leave it in the mailbox.
1. Select the Delete radio-button to delete mail recognized as spam, or the Mark as spam and store in mailbox radio-button to leave the mail marked as spam in your mailbox;
2. Click Set to save the changes.
If you decide to leave the mail recognized as spam in your mailbox such messages will be marked correspondingly so that they can be easily visually identified. In particular, a special string is added to the subject of the message (e.g., by default the string *****SPAM***** will be added to the spam messages subjects). You can change this string (or tag) to whatever you like, or even to disable this option.
1. In order to activate/deactivate the option of modifying the spam messages subject, check the Modify spam mail subject;
2. To change the text of the string, click into the input field and enter the new text;
3. Click Set to save the changes.
Black list is a list of E-mail addresses, which are automatically considered as sending unsolicited mail – spam. Therefore, all messages coming from the E-mail addresses that match those specified in the black list will automatically be marked as spam.

You can add to the black list either exact E-mail addresses or patters, using wildcards (‘*’, e.g.: entry ‘*@spammers.online.com will cause all messages coming from the domain spammers.online.com be marked as spam, regardless of what the exact mail name is).
1. Enter the E-mail address or pattern into the Email pattern input field;
2. Click Add to add the new entry to the black list, the new entry will appear in the user’s black list section.
The Administrator’s black list section contains the server wide black list entries that were added by the Administrator. If you chose to use the server wide filtering settings (the Use server wide settings checkbox checked) you may wish to edit this section by removing unnecessary entries. To do that, just select the Administrator’s black list entry and click Remove.

White list contains E-mail addresses, which are automatically considered as trustworthy. Therefore, all messages coming from the E-mail addresses that match those specified in the white list will never be marked as spam.

You can add to the white list either exact E-mail addresses or patters, using wildcards (‘*’, e.g.: entry *@your-company.com will cause all messages coming from the domain your-company.com not be marked as spam, regardless of the content of a message).
1. Enter the E-mail address or pattern into the Email pattern input field;
2. Click Add to add the new entry to the white list, the new entry will appear in the user’s white list section.
The Administrator’s white list section contains the server wide white list entries that were added by the Administrator. If you chose to use the server wide filtering settings (the Use server wide settings checkbox checked) you may wish to edit this section by removing unnecessary entries. To do that, just select the Administrator’s white list entry and click Remove.

TRAINING SPAM FILTER

You can train your mail filters on actual messages you receive.

Please note that if you use standalone mail client (e.g. Outlook Express, MS Outlook) for handling mail tasks, it should be set up to store messages on the server, so that Spam Filter may be trained. You can read how to configure Outlook Express or MS Outlook for this purpose.

To do this:

Click the Training icon in the Tools group.

All e-mail messages from your mail box are presented on the screen. Each message is accompanied by an icon in the left column, which tells if a message is recognized as spam - , non-spam - , or not recognized at all - . If you have already trained your spam filter on a message and the results were recorded in the Bayesian database, an icon is shown in the right column.
To mark a message as spam, select the corresponding check box and click ‘It’s Spam!’ To mark a message as not spam, select the corresponding check box and click ‘It’s Not Spam’. To remove any information on a given message from the spam filter database, select the corresponding check box and click ‘Forget It’.

Note:To view a message source, click the respective message subject. To remove a message from your mail box, select the respective check box and click Remove Selected.
When finished with training, click Up Level to return to the previous screen.

A spam filter database can become corrupt, or the data inside it unreliable. This may happen when many non-spam e-mails have been learned as spam, or vice versa, and the spam filter subsequently produces incorrect results. If the spam filter appears to be working incorrectly, clear its database and start afresh. To do this, click the ‘Clear Spam Filter Database’ button.