The Register4Less.com Blog

I have had a gmail account setup for a number of years, but really haven’t been getting much use out it since I prefer to use my personal email based on my own domain name, which is of course registered and hosted with register4less.com.  The one thing gmail does actually do quite well is filter spam with a low rate of filtering out valid email.  There are a number of reasons I recommend to use an email address based on your own domain, including branding, portability, tie-in with your website, but that’s not the focus of this post.

Gmail allows you to forward incoming messages to your gmail address to any other external address, and this is what allows you to flow your email to gmail and back to your domain based email address for filtering.  Here are the steps:

Setup on Gmail:

• If you don’t have a gmail account, go to their website and create a free account
• Log into your gmail account, and go to Settings page, and then to the Forwarding and Pop tab.
• In the Forwarding option, set gmail to forward all email to your domain based email address, and keep a copy in inbox on your gmail account.

Setup on R4L:

In this example, I will use the example email address johndoe@gmail.com and john@doe.com (both not real addresses, so please don’t email them).  My apologies if Mr. Doe receives additional email as a result of this post 🙂

• Log into your account on Register4Less.com and go to the cPanel (Paid Hosting > Manage Advanced Hosting) where you normally manage your email accounts.
• Click on Email Filters, and then your email address (john@doe.com in this example)
• Click the blue Create Filter button
• Give the filter a name (gmail filtering)
• Under rules, choose Any Header and does not contain
• In the box below, enter in the text X-Forwarded For: followed by your gmail address and then your domain based address.   In our example, that would be  X-Forwarded For: johndoe@gmail.com john@doe.com .
• Under Actions, choose Redirect to Email, and in the text box below enter in your gmail address.  Again in our example, you would enter in johndoe@gmail.com .
• Click the blue Save button

That is the entire setup.  Your email will now forward to gmail (spam included), be filtered, and then forwarded back.  The filter in your R4L account checks to see if the email was forwarded from your gmail account, and only if it finds that the email did not come from there will it forward to gmail.

You may know that Register4Less.com automatically backs up all of our hosting accounts on a daily basis for one week, and on a weekly basis for four weeks.  Setting up this forward will also create an additional backup for you, as all of the email that is forwarded to your gmail account will stay in the inbox there as well.

Please give this a try and let us know how it works for you.

Ahh, spam. Nobody likes spam. As a hosting provider, we really don’t like spam. But there are steps you can take to help protect your inbox from spammers. That’s why we have specific tools available to you in the cPanel interface to deal with spam. Some of these like BoxTrapper we’ve written about before.

SpamAssassin

Preloaded into the cPanel dashboard, SpamAssassin is an open-source tool built to filter and classify emails while blocking spam. Through a combination of subject line and body text analysis, Bayesian filtering, and DNS blacklists, SpamAssassin drastically limits and can  prevent spam from touching your inbox.

Creating a Spam Filter

In the Mail section of your cPanel account, choose Apache SpamAssassin. By default, Apache SpamAssassin is enabled.

Now you’re ready to set up email filters and specify how powerfully you’d like SpamAssassin to gate and vet incoming messages.

First, head to the “Email” section, navigate to “Global Filters,” and select “Create New Filter.”

Then, select “Spam Bar” from the first menu in the “Rules” section and then choose “Contains”from the second menu in that same section.

In that field, enter a spam score using a series of (+++++) symbols, with 5 being an adequate number for an individual user.  Lower numbers here mean a more aggressive spam filter.  Select “Deliver to folder” from the “Actions” section and enter the name of the folder (usually Junk or Spam) to which you would like to direct spam.  We don’t recommend deleting spam with this particular filter

Finally, click “Create” to activate the spam filter and, voila, your first filter is set up! (Be sure to check to occasionally check this folder to ensure items that are NOT spam aren’t being flagged.)

If you are getting spam that has specific patterns in the subject, from or to address or other part of the header, you can filter against these patterns as well.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post.

If you’re hosting a WordPress site/blog, chances are, you’re going to have to deal with spam comments being posted to your site.  WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) environment in use by developers, with over 25% of websites globally now running WordPress.  While it’s undeniably a powerful and flexible platform with which to build your site, it’s also the number 1 targeted platform for spammers.

Can’t I Just Ignore Spam?

Some people new to hosting sites will leave spam comments on their websites, thinking the appearance of comments & ping backs will look like their website is getting increased traffic and interest.  Reasons you don’t want to do this include:

• Bad links will hurt your search engine placement.  Google and other search engines are cracking down on bad links.  If your site is linking to known unrepeatable sources, you will likely see your SEO rankings decline.
• Spam on your website tells your visitors you’re not paying attention to your website.  Generally visitors to  your site will see spam comments for what they are.  This essentially tells your site visitors that you’re not keeping up with the management of your site’s content.
• Spam will slow down your website.  Spam creates unnecessary additional content for your website to load, and can grow quite quickly if not managed.  This will add time for every page to load on your website, and encourages visitors to abandon the page load and go elsewhere.
• Most Spam comments and trackbacks contain links.  More bad news for your site’s visitors.  Many of these links go back to virus/malware, which if followed, could lead to your visitor’s computer becoming infected, and possibly their computer/email account becoming compromised.

Now that you understand why it’s important to keep up maintenance of your website and keep comments & ping backs free from spam, let’s look at some approaches to help you accomplish this.

Automatically Filter Spam Using an Anti-Spam Plugin

By default, the anti-spam filter Akismet is installed and waiting for you to activate it.  To do so, simply log into your WordPress dashboard, click on Plugins, and activate for Akismet.  You will need to register with them to get the plugin running.  Akismet will trap spam and notify you by email when new comments are awaiting moderation.

Regularly Check and Approve/Decline Comments

A continuation of the first point, Akismet will trap comments posted to your site, and allow you to Approve, Trash, or mark comments as Spam.  Letting Akismet know a comment is spam also will help train its filter.  No spam filter is perfect, so sometimes Akismet will place a legitimate comment or pingback into the spam folder.  You should not just delete everything thats been tagged as spam, but go through to make sure legitimate comments get approved.

Disable Comments After a Period of Time

If you’re writing posts to your site, consider disabling comments to the posts after real comment traffic has settled down.  What this period will be will depend on your site and how active comments are given a post you’ve put up.

More coming next week.

We’ll post part two of this next week.  Until then….

If you’re an R4L customer using one of our combined web and email hosting packages, BoxTrapper is an aggressive spam filtering service that can help defeat spammers.

How it Works

When we receive new email for your account from an address you have not whitelisted, BoxTrapper will hold the email in a pending list.  For the email to make it to your inbox, one of two things needs to happen:

1. The sender confirms they are a human sending email and not a spam bot.  This is done via an email that is sent back to the sender with a link to a page on your website to confirm.
2. You review your list of “trapped” mail, select the email and click the option to Whitelist and Deliver.

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