Spam is an ever-present problem for anyone running a website with email. If your cPanel server handles email for your domain, you already have one of the most powerful anti-spam tools available: SpamAssassin. This open-source spam filter scores every incoming message against thousands of rules and lets you decide what to block, tag, or deliver. But SpamAssassin only works well when it is properly configured.
Default settings will catch obvious spam, but they often miss more sophisticated messages or — worse — flag legitimate emails as spam. In this guide, you will learn how to configure SpamAssassin in cPanel to strike the right balance between aggressive filtering and accurate delivery. We will cover scoring, custom rulesets, the AutoLearn system, user-level preferences, and integration with Apache SpamAssassin daemon (spamd).