When you receive an email on your hosting, it is analysed by SpamAssassin to determine whether it is SPAM or not.
How to find out why it was flagged as SPAM
- Open the source code of the email to view the headers. Here we explain how to view the headers of an email.
- Look for the X-Spam-Report section: you will see all the tests SpamAssassin ran on that email. Each test has three parts:
- Score
- Variable (rule name)
- Description
- By default, the total score for an email to be considered SPAM is 5. In the example image, the email was flagged as SPAM because it reached a score of 6.4.
- In that example, the SPF_SOFTFAIL variable alone contributed 5 points. This particular error happens because the sender sent the email from an IP not authorised in their SPF record.
If it is a legitimate email, the fix is on the sender's side: they should ask their hosting company to correct their SPF record.
Marking senders as legitimate (whitelist)
You can mark a sender's emails as legitimate so the server never flags them as SPAM:
- In cPanel, open the "Spam Filters" option.
- Scroll down to "Additional Configurations".
- Add the sender's address under "Whitelist".
Raising the score threshold
You can also raise the threshold so emails are only flagged as SPAM when they reach a higher score:
