Mon 9 Jul 2007
cPanel 11 New Exim and SPAM Assassin Configuration
Posted by jsupport-user1 under How To , PersonalDigg This Entry , [12] Comments
Hello,
I recently upgraded my servers to the cpanel 11 when I received a notice from cpanel that stated, “Unable to automaticlly update the mailer config…”. So I manually performed the upgrade only to discover that email was being handled very differently after the upgrade. No email that was marked as SPAM was was being delivered. Instead it was being dropped. This meant that there would be no way to check for a false positive email marked as SPAM. Normally spammy email has it’s subject rewritten to prefixed with, “[spam]”. This allowed the user to then use a filter in their email client to filter email with “[spam]” in the subject to a folder for later review. This would keep the inbox clean.
I did some research and found that this was a common issue with the new cPanel 11. After many hours of thinking that I may have to downgrade the server to cPanel 10, I found my answer in WHM. When you log into WHM as root there is a section called, “Service Configuration”. In this section you will find, “Exim Configuration Editor”.
In the “Exim Configuration Editor” page in the, “Mail” section just above the the buttons marked, “Visualized ACLs and Save” is an option to use the old old transport, “Use the old transport based spamassassin system instead of the new acl style one. (not recommended, slow)”. When I first saw this and it said it was not recommended I looked for an alternative. I could not find one. I need my email spammy or not to be delivered to each users inbox for their review.
Check this option, “Use the old transport based spamassassin system instead of the new acl style one. (not recommended, slow)” and click the save button. If you were previously using subject rewrites SPAM Assassin will again rewrite your subjects. You can also make use tof the X-Spam-Flag header for filtering this is a YES or NO value.
At least by doing this you can continue to make use of the NEW cPanel 11 features while monitoring the cPanel forums to see of the Exim ACL’s have been fixed to allow subject rewrites and delivery of email marked as SPAM.
Sincerely,
Mike
Michael:
Thanks for this tip. It’s too bad that the folks at CPanel allowed Spamassassin to be broken in their upgrade. Having the score in the header is an essential feature in managing SPAM.
Hi Stephen,
Your welcome. When I first saw what was happening with email after upgrading I thought, “Something is not right here.” When I found out that it was just broken and there was no fix other than back grading the transport I was annoyed. How could anyone at cPanel think that it is/was a good idea to break such a core feature and then mark the fix as not recommended. If a fix comes out before I get it posted here feel free to ping me so I can add to this posting.
Mike
If I don’t check the “Use the old transport based spamassassin system..” option, does that mean Spamassassin is not being used at all to filter out spam?
Hi Daniel,
No it means that it will not deliver anything that is marked as SPAM to an inbox and use the ACL style transport instead. I found that this new style does not support subject re-writing either. Spamassassin will still continue filtering your email.
Mike
Is this the same issue you speak of?
I configured User Level filtering to block out spam bar that has 5 +’s or greater. It works as prescribed.
However, I noticed that if I put a whitelist entry in SpamAssasin, the User Level filtering does not look at SA to override its own filters.
In other words, someone who is whitelisted because their email keeps getting erroneously tagged as spam won’t actually get whitelisted. The Whitelist is worthless in this case.
Hi,
So to be clear if you use the new ACL style configuration and set a user filter the users whitelist is ignored. Removing the filter allows the whitelist to operate properly.
I think you may found a bug in cPanel. Have tried to opening a cPanel ticket?
Mike
Anyone know if these bugs have been addressed?
My users just reported that as of Jan 1 07 they started receiving a large increase in spam. Are there any new changes people know of?
Hi David,
Did you mean Jan 01, 2008? I have not noticed anything unusual on my servers. But I also reject SPAM from the top down. I add code to my exim.con to reject email with a SPAM value of 17 or more. It makes a huge difference.
Mike
Yes, I did mean 2008! I use a cut off of 5. I guess I should increase it ??
Hi David,
There may be more to is than that. I’m running:
WHM 11.11.0 cPanel 11.16.0-R18546
WHM X v3.1.0
I recently had to reset my exim conifiguration to defaults. WHM now supports subject re-writes so I do not use ‘Use the old transport” for SA. Basically it now does all the stuff I was trying to do manually. But about you now.
Where is what I’d try, ONLY IF YOU HAVE NO ADVANCED ENTRIES IN THE ADVANCED EDITORS:
1. login to WHM and go to the exim conifiguration.
2. Reset all configs to defaults. Button is at the bottum of the page.
3. under ACL, uncheck “SpamAssassinTM: Reject mail with a spam score is greater then 20.0 at SMTP time. ” AND DO CHECK “SpamAssassinTM: Reject mail with a spam score is greater then 15.0 at SMTP time. ”
4. Leave the rest as default settings. and click the save button.
If you need to white email servers that have trouble sending you email check “Whitelist: Trusted Mail Hosts/Ip Blocks”. click save then edit the list. You can get the MX record for a given domain from here http://network-tools.com/nslook/ or use some other similar tool.
Mike
Hi Mike:
I was researching why the “***SPAM***” stopped coming through on the subject line of my and my clients emails when I came accross this string. It is now March 27, 2009.
My cPanel/WHM is: cPanel 11.24.4-R34599 – WHM 11.24.2 – X 3.9
It appears this is still an issue? Are you aware of anything new on this?
Thank you,
Doug
Hi Doug,
I’ve stopped using spam assassin all together and use a hosted email filter. It made a huge difference in what makes it to the inbox but is still held in quarantine for review.
I’m sure you looking for a fix, but here is link to our hosted email filter info:
http://www.jikometrix.net/content/view/80/124/
Mike