We all know spam is a global problem. The question? How to get rid of it, or how to take control of it. There are plenty of ways to do this, and this post will (hopefully) help you get things straightened out and figured out in how to address this issue. Please note, that from hereon , in this post, I will be assuming that you are using CPanel, have root access, and can change things around in the shell. If you’re not comfortable with SSH access, we can help you out, you just need to contact us for a quote.


To start off, you will need to remove spamassassin. Spamassassin is well known to cause load in your servers, and is a poor implementation of “spam protection” at best. Don’t worry, we will tell you how, but this needs to be done. To do this:

Go into WHM -> service manager and uncheck the “spamd” services, then click save
Now, go into WHM -> configuration, and UN check the following options

  • SpamAssassin Spam Filter
  • BoxTrapper Spam Trap

Now, go and license CPanel PRO on your server (at this time it is free). You will need this for a couple of the plugins you are going to install

Once you’ve licensed Cpanel PRO , you can install the clamd plugin. Go into WHM -> Manage Plugins and click on the clamav connector there, then submit.

After a few minutes, your clamd plugin will be installed. Then, you need to go out and pick up the ASSP Cpanel plugin. There are two approaches to this.

These guys offer a free script, which works, and integrates directly into your user’s control panel
This script works, is closed source, and is not free. Of course, this as well will integrate into your control panel. The only downfall is it is encoded, and it’s not free. It’s up to you to decide whether you would trust that script.

Both of the above scripts work (reportedly) reasonably well, though I can attest to the first one working, and installing ASSP + necessary files. I can’t as far as the second one, only because it’s not worth it for me to pay and install something like this that I can’t trust (it’s encoded) with root access.

Once you’ve got the script, follow the script’s instructions. For the first one, it’s as simple as downloading their tar file (in the shell), and installing it . To do this, extract the tar file

tar zxpf asspx.tar.gz
cd asspx
sh ./install.sh

When you get all done, you will need to go to WHM -> Sultan Server ASSPX for Cpanel and change a few things around. All of this can be done from inside of WHM -> Sultan Server ASSPX for Cpanel (at the bottom)

  1. Remove all boxtrapper settings
  2. Remove all Spamassassin Settings
  3. Install ASSP
  4. Set Password
  5. Set SRS  Secret Key
  6. Install cPanel interface
  7. Install Exim configuration

Once you’ve done all of this, restart BOTH ASSP and Exim

service assp restart
service exim restart

This will ensure that  settings will take.

Now, managing your ASSP installation can be tricky. For beginners, I’d advise staying with the settings they give you. If you continue to get spam, or get continued complaints about settings just not being right, please, feel free to contact us, and we’ll set you up with a quote for setting things up . We’ve got a pretty good setup going here that has been running incredibly effectively (stats here) for a year or better.

Next time? RBLs, what to do, which to use, which to stay away from and how to tell if YOU are listed!