Take care with Spamassassin

Spamassassin is a popular anti-spam tool which comes installed on commonly used control panels such as Cpanel.

However, while Spamassassin may offer a useful tool for server admins and webmasters alike, it is a tool to take care with.

Recently, I was asked to provide outsource services to a major high street brand by a marketing company.

A few days later I received a phone call asking after some emails which had been sent to me – which I never received.

The emails were being sent direct to my business site, but they weren’t coming through. My initial thought was that there was nothing wrong with my emails, so it must be the marketing company having problems.

I then received a heads up from someone I was also hosting on the same hosting account that their emails had suddenly stopped.

It turned out that eUKhost, whom the reseller account was hosted with, had been tweaking Spamassassin settings directly on the server.

After a long string of filtering test messages, those messages stopped – and so did some of those all important emails.

I had already migrated my business site and emails to a different server – correcting the problem – before I found out that Spamassassin had been the cause.

Simply put, the settings had left it prone to false positive matching, leading to the missing emails – and the potential to lose a very important corporate contract.

The warning is clear – while Spamassassin is a useful anti-spam tool, it only remains as effective as the settings provided.

Too aggressive, and the chances are it won’t just be the spam that gets filtered out. It could be all important business contracts.

Category: General Hosting