Controlling Spam

One of the biggest complaints we receive is due to unwanted spam.  Whether you are a Virtual hosting client of ours or an OzStore user, SPAM settings can be configured through your site administration.

To access your site administration, visit:

<yourdomain>.<extension>/siteadmin

Eg: www.dolphin-it.com/siteadmin

If you do not know your administration details, please contact us and speak with helpdesk.

Spam Settings

Please find below an example breakdown of email accounts on our hosting, detailing the ‘required hits’ and function to perform setting. 

The settings in the example do not prevent any spam coming through, they merely mark as spam.  You can either adjust the spam setting to Auto Delete, and adjust the required hits as you feel necessary, or alternatively create a rule in outlook that would move all marked spam messages to a specific location.

To create a rule the user can access the ‘Tools / Rules and Alerts’ menu, then create a rule where all email with ‘SPAM’ in the subject line is moved to a specific folder.

This will solve the spam issues of most users.

An explanation of required hits follows the user table below:

Full Name	User Name	Email Aliases	Required Hits	Spam Setting
Greg Board	gboard	greg, gregboard, info	6	Just Mark Detected
Ralph Saunders	rsaunders	ralph, ralph.saunders	6	Just Mark Detected
Sales	sales		6	Just Mark Detected
Sandra Saunders	ssaunders	news, sandra.saunders	3	Auto-Delete Detected

What are 'Required Hits'?

The Required Hits value represents the minimum score for a message to be labeled as spam. Using the default settings, *****SPAM***** is added to the beginning of the subject line of a message that has a point value of 5 or more.  This is useful if you do not want to delete any messages or prefer to sort spam into a separate folder.   You can make SpamAssassin stricter by decreasing the Required Hits, or increase the number to make SpamAssassin more lenient.

Here is a detailed example of how it works.

SPAM: Content analysis details:   (16.67 hits, 5 required)
SPAM: Hit! (1 point)     From: contains numbers mixed in with letters
SPAM: Hit! (1.27 points) Reply-To: is empty
SPAM: Hit! (1 point)     Subject contains lots of white space
SPAM: Hit! (0.5 points)  Subject has an exclamation mark
SPAM: Hit! (0.5 points)  'Received:' has 'may be forged' warning
SPAM: Hit! (0.01 points) BODY: Asks you to click below
SPAM: Hit! (1 point)     BODY: Claims you can be removed from the list
SPAM: Hit! (1.2 points)  BODY: HTML mail with non-white background
SPAM: Hit! (1 point)     BODY: Uses a dotted-decimal IP address in URL
SPAM: Hit! (1.82 points) BODY: Link to a URL containing 'remove'
SPAM: Hit! (1.56 points) Contains phrases frequently found in spam
SPAM:[score:  36, hits: click here, fill out, from]
SPAM:[our, future mailings, here removed, list please,]
SPAM:[mailing list, our mailing, please click, removed]
SPAM:[from, you like, you need, you receive]
SPAM: Hit! (1 point)     spam-phrase score is over 20
SPAM: Hit! (3.33 points) HTML-only mail, with no text version
SPAM: Hit! (1.48 points) Subject contains a unique ID number

Required Hits:

This feature specifies how many positive hits in regards to SPAM-typical phrases an email must have before it is reported as SPAM. The higher this value is, the less sensitive the filter is and the more SPAM will pass through it undetected

1.) Tag and deliver SPAM:
All email will be delivered to the regular mailbox, but detected SPAM is clearly marked as such.

2.) Filter disabled
No filtering will be done. All emails - SPAM or not - will be delivered to the regular mailbox unchecked and unaltered. Selecing 'Filter disabled' will automatically set Required Hits to 900, which will disable the SPAM-Filter for this account.

3.) Move to folder caughtspam
All detected SPAM is moved into a separate IMAP folder called 'caughtspam'. This separate IMAP folder can either be checked with an IMAP capable email client, via the web mail interface <yourdomain>/webmail , or from the command line with the commands 'mail', 'mutt' or 'pine'.

4.) Delete SPAM on the server
That is the most drastic option and allows a user to automatically delete all detected SPAM on the server. The GUI interface shows a warning that loss of legitimate emails is then solely the users' responsibility.
We hope this assists you for any further enquiries, please email helpdesk@dolphin-it.com or call us on 1300 663 452