In this article we bring today we will talk about how to configure Apache SpamAssassin to avoid spam in a very simple way. Email is one of the inventions of the century. People who use it daily forget that not long ago we had to send letters by regular mail that took days to reach their destination or invest a fortune in a fax machine.

You may also be interested in why my emails go directly to Spam.

But email has a serious problem that affects practically all email accounts in the world, spam or junk mail.

Spam is nothing more than unsolicited emails that arrive in our inbox, usually with the most varied advertising, which sometimes becomes very annoying.

Junk mail can become a major problem as hundreds of unwanted emails can be received per day, thus preventing the normal use of an email account.

In your hosting provider plans, there is an application called Apache SpamAssassin installed that any user can activate to have their own antispam filter.

To access the Apache SpamAssassin antispam filter, we have to access the control panel of our hosting cPanel.

Once inside cPanel, we must go to the Email section and look for the Spam Filters icon.

From there we can access Spam Filters and configure it, although at the time of writing this article all the options appear in English, it is expected that they will soon be translated, since they will remain in English regardless of what language we have configured in our cPanel.

Activating Spam Filters is very simple. The first option we find is Process New Emails and Mark them as Spam: which we can translate as: Process new emails and mark them as spam.

So we just have to click on the activation toggle for the filter to start working.

We will see that a message appears indicating that the filter has been activated after clicking the toggle to verify that everything is OK.

The option offered by the filter is Automatically Delete New Spam (Auto-Delete): and what this option does is automatically delete any email that the filter detects as spam.

At this point, the basic configuration of Spam Filters would be enough. In this way, the filter will delete every email it detects as spam.

If we see any unwanted mail in our inbox, what we should do is move it to the spam folder, not delete or erase it.

In this way we are telling the filter that this message is spam so that it takes it into account when receiving similar emails.

Even so, if we see that we are receiving a lot of spam emails in the inbox, we can make the filter more aggressive.

For this we have to click on the option Spam Threshold Score, on the main screen of the filter.

On the next screen we see that we have a drop-down menu that, if we have not changed it before, should be set to Default (5) (Current).

This is the default aggressiveness state of the antispam filter. If we open the drop-down menu, we will see that we can change it.

1 is very aggressive and 10 is very lax.

If we set the score to Aggressive, Many False Positives (1), many legitimate emails will end up in the spam folder.

If we set the score to Passive, Only Very Obvious Spam (10), it will only mark emails that are clearly spam as spam, so it is likely that many unwanted emails will end up in the inbox.

The recommended thing is to start with a score of 5 and if we receive a lot of spam in the inbox, lower it to 4 and see how it works.

After that, we just have to click on Update Scoring Options to save the changes.