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How to Adjust Spam Assassin Rule Scoring Serverwide

Austin Lowery
  • Updated

Introduction

Spam Assassin determines whether or not a message is spam based on the message's final calculated spam score. The overall score is calculated by testing the message against various rules, each assigning a sub-score, and then summing the sub-scores. If you find that specific Spam assassin rules are weighted too heavily or are not weighted enough, you may use the procedure in this guide to change them.

 

Procedure

  1. Access the server's command line as the 'root' user via SSH or "Terminal" in WHM.
  2. Backup the /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf file. 
    cp -a /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf{,.$(date +%s)}
  3. Open /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf in your preferred text editor.
  4. Add your custom score configuration using the SCORE $ruleid $scorevalue format. 
    SCORE RDNS_NONE 6
    Please note that "$ruleid" and "$scorevalue" must be replaced with the rule ID of the rule to modify and the new score, respectively.
  5. Save the changes and exit the text editor.
  6. Restart the spamd service. 
    /scripts/restartsrv_spamd

 

Additional resources

How to Find SpamAssassin Scan Results

How to adjust the weight of a SpamAssassin Rule

How to edit a file on command-line

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