How can I reduce the amount of spam I receive?

The first thing you can do to cut down on spam is to make sure you are not using a catch-all email address for your domain. A catch-all email address will take any email addressed to any non-existent user and send it to a particular email address. Spammers have figured out that some people use these and send email to many possible email addresses at each domain name. This can cause a large amount of spam to make it to your inbox.

To remove a catch-all email address in your Plesk 5 control panel (Upipe and MDH hosting accounts):

  1. Click on the domain name of the domain you wish to check.
  2. Click on the Preferences button.
  3. Check the "Mail to non-existent user" field. Set this to "Bounce with phrase" instead of "Catch to Address".
  4. Click on the Update button.

To remove a catch-all email address in your Plesk 7.5.4 control panel (OHP and WebPro hosting accounts):

  1. Click on the System tab (WebPro only).
  2. Click on the domain name of the domain you wish to check.
  3. Click on Mail.
  4. Click on Preferences.
  5. Select "Reject".
  6. Click on the OK button to save your changes.

To remove a catch-all email address in your HSPC control panel:

  1. Click on the System tab.
  2. In the main window, click on "Mail Forwarding".
  3. If you have a forwarding rule that forwards mail addressed to " *@domain.com" to a specific email address, delete this rule.

Our OHP, WebPro, and some VPS hosting accounts have Spam Assassin available. Spam Assassin is a program that scans email content for patterns that make it likely to be spam. If the program determines that the email is likely spam, it will either mark the email as spam or let you view it or delete the potential spam.

Another option would be to purchase a client-side (runs on your computer rather than the server) spam filtering program that functions similar to Spam Assassin.

If you are using a VPS you can set up one or more spam filtering blacklist in your HSPC control panel with the following steps:

  1. Click on the System tab.
  2. Click on Spam Filter in the Mail Management section.
  3. Click on the Add Spam Filter button.
  4. Select "Use a popular spam blocking System".
  5. Select one of the spam blocking systems from the drop down list. (On our shared servers we use the spamcop.net spam blocking system.)
  6. Click on the Save button.

These spam filters block any email whose source is the blacklisted IP address rather than downloading the email to your server. This should significantly reduce the amount of spam your VPS receives, which will reduce the amount of incoming traffic to your VPS.

In general you should never respond to a spam email (even to unsubscribe or remove yourself from a mailing list for which you never signed up), because this just lets the spammer know that your email address is read by a real person.

We also have an Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Email Filtering Service available. This email service (on average) will reduce the amount of spam you receive by 95 percent over no spam filtering at all. You can find more information regarding our Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Email Filtering Service at:

http://forum.schmolie.com/index.php?showtopic=1899

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