When you receive an email, it is analyzed by SpamAssassin to detect if it is SPAM or not.
If you want to know the reason why it has been detected as SPAM, you must follow these steps:
- Access the email code to see the headers. Here we explain how to see the headers of an e-mail
- Look for the section: X-Spam-Report and you will see all the tests carried out by SpamAssassin in that email. Each test consists of three parts:
- Punctuation
- Variable
- Description

- The total score by default of an email to be considered as SPAM is 5, in the example of the previous image the email was classified as SPAM because it had a score of 6.4.
- We see that only the variable SPF_SOFTFAIL has reported a score of 5. This particular error is caused because the sender has sent the mail from an unauthorized IP in their SPF record.
- If it is a legitimate email, the sender should be told to contact their hosting company to have their SPF record corrected.
Finally, you can mark a sender’s emails as legitimate so that the server never marks them as SPAM. To do this, within cPanel access the option “Spam Filters”, download where it says “Additional Configurations” and add the sender’s email where it says “Whitelist”.