MailScanner Spam/Virus Filtering
Every hosting account at Maxer Host is protected by MailScanner. MailScanner is a sophisticated utility that scans all incoming email arriving on our email servers. MailScanner stops 'bad content' such as spam, viruses and malicious attachments from reaching your email inbox.
How to check messages being filtered using MailControl
If you suspect that a legitimate email may have been filtered out, MailControl has an interface that allows you to verify which emails have been filtered within the past 7 days.
- Please login to cPanel and navigate to Email => MailScanner
- Next, click the "MailControl" button.
Every email will be given a "spam score". Emails with a low spam score will have {Spam?} tag added to the subject line, and emails with a high spam score will be discarded (never delivered). This protects you by eliminating unwanted and dangerous emails.
The MailControl page will give you an overview of all messages considered to be spam. Yellow messages (low scoring spam) are possibly spam messages, but these are still delivered to your inbox (with {Spam?} added to the subject) for you to manually check. Amber/orange messages (high scoring spam) contain content that is considered high-risk, and these messages are discarded (never delivered to your inbox).
To see the details of a specific email, click on the button with the warning sign icon under the "View/Status" column. There you will find more details about the email and the criteria based on which the email was filtered. If you scroll down to "Actions", you will be able to train the spam filter and mark the email as spam (unwanted email) or ham (trusted email).
How to change the filtering scores using Other Settings
Back to the main cPanel control panel, please navigate to Email => MailScanner again, but this time click on the "Other Settings" button.
You can manage the "low spam score" (default value 4) and "high spam score" (default value 6). This is good for most businesses.
You can decrease the score to 3, 2, 1 and so on, but this will increase the risk of legitimate email being mistaken for spam. You can increase the score to 5, 6, 7 and so on, but this will increase the chance of spam not getting detected.
How to disable spam scanning altogether
Back to the main cPanel control panel, please navigate to Email => MailScanner again, then scroll down to "Change All Domain Settings" or "Change Individual Domain Settings". You can choose whether to apply the change to all domains or an individual domain.
Look for the setting for "Spam Scanning" and set it to OFF, then click the "Change" button to save the change. Now, spam scanning will no longer take place.
