How to Activate the Email Spam Filter

Spam is a daily threat to every email account: phishing messages, malicious attachments, and automated campaigns targeting data theft or malware distribution. At the same time, sorting through unwanted mail every day wastes valuable time and increases the risk of an important message getting lost in the volume.

Our servers run rspamd software for server-level filtering, while through DirectAdmin you can define your own policies per domain: spam score threshold, blocking strategy, whitelist/blacklist, and the delivery method for suspicious messages.

A well-configured spam filter is the first line of defense: it analyzes every incoming message, assigns it a risk score, and handles it automatically — without you having to do it manually.

Below we explain how you can enable and configure the spam filter through your DirectAdmin panel. DirectAdmin displays it as “SpamAssassin”, but in practice your settings are applied through rspamd running on the server.

Enabling Spam Filters

Log in to DirectAdmin by typing your domain domainname.tld:2222 and entering your username and password.

From the main menu, go to the E-mail Manager section and select SpamAssassin Setup.
If the service is not already active, click the “ENABLE SPAMASSASSIN” button.

Settings

Settings are configured per domain. You can select a domain from the domain selector displayed at the top right.

Basic Settings

In this section we define the filter’s behavior:

• Blocking strategy: Choose whether suspicious messages will remain in the Inbox, be moved to a separate folder (Spambox), or be deleted automatically.
• High score block: Here we set the score threshold above which a message is automatically deleted. With No, the Global Threshold is used (a common threshold for all domains in the account). With Yes, you define a Custom High-Score (for the specific domain only), useful if you want a more lenient or stricter threshold compared to your other domains.

Important: After every change, remember to click the “SAVE CONFIGURATION” button to save your settings.

Advanced Settings

Here you can fine-tune the filter’s behavior:

• Global threshold: Set the value of the global threshold (applies to all domains in your account).
• Rewrite subject: You can add an identifier to the subject line of spam emails (e.g. *****SPAM*****) to make them easy to spot.
• Spam Delivery: Choose between adding X-Spam Headers (the Don’t Use attachments option) or Attachment Mode, where the spam email will arrive as an attachment in a new email. This way you can open the new email without the risk of automatically executing malicious code.

Initial Recommended Settings

When first enabling the spam filter, we recommend starting with the following settings and adjusting them if necessary:

• Blocking Strategy: Inbox
• High score block: No
• Global threshold: Low or Medium depending on the volume of spam you receive and how strict you want the filter to be
• Rewrite subject: No
• Spam delivery: Use attachments

Acceptance and Blocking Lists (Whitelist & Blacklist)

Blacklisted E-mails: add here the addresses from which you receive unwanted or malicious mail, to block them permanently.

Whitelisted E-mails: add here the email addresses or domains you trust, so they are never filtered as spam.