A guide to Magic Spam on your Cpanel

We have recently installed a brand new piece of anti-spam software to replace the dated Spamassasin. This is known as Magic Spam and is one of the top anti-spam software's available for Cpanel and should adequately assist you in cutting down on the majority of the spam that you may get through as well as assisting you in making sure that legitimate emails get through aswell. Often spam programmes can have settings that aggressively cut spam but also may identify certain incoming emails as spam aswell, and so it is important to be able to work from both a blacklisting and whitelisting perspective in order to fully optimise your experience in making an effort to cut down on your spam or infact get rid of it completely with the right settings and the appropriate amount of time put into updating filters to make sure that you stay on top of your spam issues.

In order to access the Magic Spam software you will first of all need to log into your Cpanel. If you don't know how to do this you can click here to find an in-depth guide on doing so. Use your current credentials to log in and you should be good to go.

From here you will need to look to the "Mail" option near the top of the screen and from here the first option that should appear will be "MagicSpam Protection".

Click this link, and from here you will be sent to the MagicSpam Pro page. There are several tools here to use which are both visual aids and text-based settings and so you should feel right at home with this easy to use and yet professional piece of software. It is easy to learn to use and will give you a hugely in-depth analysis of the emails that you are getting through as well as which of these emails have been marked as legitimate and spam. In any case you are being provided with professional software that can be fully customised to your specific needs and your own spam, and tailoring this sort of tool is vital to having efficient spam control as without it you cannot possibly hope to identify your spam let alone get rid of it.

Once you have opened the MagicSpam programme, it is time to work out initially whether or not you want to use the programme. It is a very efficient spam-cutting tool but to make sure legitimate emails do come through you will need to be relatively active on the whitelisting so that you can make sure that all of your emails that could be viewed as spam will get through. If you feel that you don't have the time or resources to do this every so often, then the best choice for a period of time until you can find the time to make these filters is scroll all the way to the bottom and simply switch the status from "on" to "off".

This obviously isn't advised but is an option for some. However, if you are getting a lot of spam emails and want to cut down on them significantly then read on to find out how Magic Spam can help you to pretty much eliminate the majority if not all of your spam mail.

The first thing you need to look at and bear in mind is the initial tool that you will find on the first page of MagicSpam which is the statistics page which is a quick run-down of the mails that you are getting through, as well as the amount that is spam and if you have any filters or white lists set up how many are being exempted. This lets you know the percentage of spam to regular mail you are getting, the amount that is being classed as spam that you have whitelisted and allowed through and your overall average mail per day, as seen below.

This data should in theory allow you to look at the ridiculous amounts of spam mail that are sent out these days, and eventually will let you see how much the tool is assisting you in both cutting out legitimate spam and how many whitelisted exceptions you may require.

The next tool that is included in the MagicSpam protocol is the logs: this allows you to track any mail that may potentially have been blocked out or come through your email address or domain, tracking the address that sent the email to see if that user has been blocked as a spammer without your knowledge. This particular tool is of great help when looking to refine your filtering, as obviously there will be certain addresses, email content and blacklisted domains that will inevitably be blocked out by the spam filter. As a spam programme it is only natural for it to do this, and this specific tool is used to combat the cutting out of illegitimate emails. If you feel that the program is cutting out too many important emails to handle in terms of whitelisting then you are welcome to turn MagicSpam off, but these little tools are designed to make it easier to proactively cut out spam, and automated systems are obviously never perfect in cutting out spam.

This is what the tool looks like after doing a very basic search for emails to a particular email address from a domain name

The tool identifies when the email was sent, why it was identified as spam, the domain it was sent from and the hostname aswell. All of this information should allow you to both see which spam is actually spam and see if there are any legitimate emails being blocked. In order to start whitelisting you will need the domain or IP address from this section and to save it for later.

There are also some other settings that you will need to look to in the next tab that are simply marked and defined as "spam settings". These particular settings are very basic spam rules and can only be changed by us, but you will not need to worry about these things as they are all rules that cut out extremely obvious spammers that don't have certain configurations in place that most regular servers or email addresses would have.

The fourth tab gives you a little more freedom and options as a customer as a lot of these options maybe recommended to be switched on but for the majority of them you are able to switch them between on and off. A couple of them are still enforced and only changeable by us, but once again these are things that only a real spammer would have problems with 99% of the time.

For the other options you can mix and match depending on whether or not you know if any of your client are on email blacklists, allowing you to get through their legitimate emails whilst also making sure you keep on the ones that are going to block out unwanted spam. Either way you are going to be much happier with the amount of control you have over the results you get.

Finally, you will need to look to the "exemptions" section of the options, and this is where you can make the big changes to the blacklists and white lists for the domain and lap them over the initial MagicSpam filtering to make for your most optimal spam reduction yet:

The first interchangeable option is mailboxes with protection disabled. This allows you to unblock certain domain names that are sending to you rather than individual mailboxes, and so whether you need emails from a particular company regarding invoices/products or a domain name that is on a shared server and a certain blacklist be sure to white list this client to ensure that they can get through to you.

Sender from white list is different in that it allows a specific email address "sender". If you have a particular person who has a hotmail address for example and would like them to be able to contact you and you don't want other users to adding them to a whitelist is greatly advised.

The opposite of course being the concept of a blacklist, as there will be a small amount of emails that aren't classed as spam by MagicSpam that you may consider to be spam, as well as some email addresses and domain names that you just don't want to receive mail from. This is specifically why you should also add blacklists. It is very important to keep up to date with both in order to get a bigger picture about the whole situation and cut down on spam whilst keeping up with legitimate mails.

You can also add blacklists and whitelists on an IP level. If you only want to receive mails from a certain office or location then whitelisting an IP is a great way to do this.

In all these settings should allow you to have a very smooth experience and cut out a lot of your spam, and you should see the results through the graphing features provided. It is imperative that you make a solid effort to test out Magic Spam for yourself to fully optimise it and make it your own, which in turn will give you a lot of excellent solutions to spam in the future.