So with the move to Pair comes a nice installation of SpamAssassin which is great as I was not really up the challenge of installation in previous hosting environments.
My goal with filtering spam was to create a separate box just to collect the spam and check it when I got the chance. My usual method through Spam Intercepter allowed for this as I would just head to my account on the site and empty the trash as well as check to make sure nothing was caught in cache limbo waiting for my approval or rejection.
Now, I have created a separate account just for spam and all messages that come through any of the other boxes I have set up – across domains even – get instantly sent to that box. I created a simple account in Mail to pull just those messages so it’s quite easy to see what’s been flagged and delete them.
Setting this up was not that obvious, but after an email with support it’s easy to do. Here are the instructions for anyone else looking to do the same
Log into the Account Control Center: https://my.pair.com/
Click E-Mail Management.
Under Mailboxes, click Create New Mailbox.
Enter the configuration information that you would like to use for the new
mailbox, and click Add Mailbox at the bottom of the page.Once that is done, then you will want to edit the configuration of the
mailbox(es) which are receiving the junk emails so that they know to
forward those messages to your newly created junk mailbox. In the settings
for each mailbox is the following field:Junk E-Mail Filtering:
In the “Save junk e-mail to a file:” text box, you will enter the
following:/usr/boxes/USERNAME/DOMAIN.COM/junk
Replacing USERNAME and DOMAIN.COM with the domain on which the mailbox resides.
This solves two issues/needs I have for mail. The first is that by checking my primary account I get the benefits of spam filtering at all times, across devices even which is great when you are using a palm or phone and don’t want to use valuable bandwidth for checking spam. The other is something I was not really that concerned with but happy to gain which is control of my mail all within my domain. Spam Intercepter, which is an excellent system, does force mail to loop outside before coming back to your inbox. Hardly terrible… but nice to have it all in one place.
The verdict is still out on this system – I know I’ve changed how I do things often – but so far this is a great way to do mail.