dlevens

Hey Rob, some good points and no offense taken. But figured I would respond to your post sorta, not really saying $9 is too steep, but $9 x how many domains you own, can definately be too steep. Plus it is rare that ICANN requests information from the registrar about you so to charge me $9 per domain just in case they have to pay some employee to respond to a request for my valid info is too much in my opinion. I would assume that since these registrars are allowed to replace my whois with their private information so as to meet the ICANN requirement that valid info be in the whois, then should not the default setup be this way? Meaning why is the default to publicly display your info allowing the spammers the upper hands, instead of the whois pointing to your registrar's info, and still meeting the need to find out the owners info if you are law enforcement. No offense but I disagree. I think this is a good thing that we come to expect more for our money. It is the american way to create competition resulting in better ways to do things at a lower cost. $35 back in the day was ripping us off. Your mention of TCH is a perfect example. You guys rock. You are able to provide amazing service for our money, thus beating your competition and at the same time (hopefully) making your company and its investors good money. So yes I do expect to get the most return on my money and for some reason I have a hard time paying $27 in my case to protect my info. It feels like the we are bending over to the spammers when the end user is forced to pay the price of privacy instead of the spammers. In my fantasy world all registrars should be required to display their private info on all the domains they have registered. If spammers want access to this info they have to pay for it, or even better you have to authorize your info to be given out. If law enforcement needs the info then it MUST be given freely to them from the registrar. I don't see justification for even $9 per domain for what would take 30 seconds for the registrar to look up my info and hand it over to law enforcement or whoever requested it. Consider the amount of services TCH offers for $4 and compare the once in a blue moon request for my private info at the registrar costing nearly double that? We are being ripped off IMHO. Not at all, this is just a back and forth of opionions and I do respect yours. Dennis

Bellringer, so you pay the $9 per domain for all your domains? hmmmmmmmm, is it just me or have we not all been fooled into just excepting the fact that we have to pay to block our own info? How did this ever come to be, having someone tell us, "oh ummm, by the way all this private info you are giving me, umm your going to have to pay me not to list this in (phonebook, whois, etc). " I don't like that my home address and phone number and email address are listed on my domain but I cannot justify paying $27 a year to have some monkey at the registrar click a button once to change it from my personal info to there personal info. Maybe I would pay a one time fee for the change but a yearly fee per domain is just rediculous. Dennis

Mike, Thanks for the info. I believe you are correct. This makes the most sense to why the spam started on the new account. So this leaves me with two options. 1. Wait it out and fight the spam as it comes in hoping it will eventually taper off as the email account gets older. 2. Pay for the privacy feature either here at WWD or another company offering it a bit cheaper. As far as option 2 I would be interested to know if anyone actually pays or uses this feature? It would cost me $27 a year since I have 3 domains. What sucks is I only use the one .com domain. The other .org and .net are just parked. But since I have to keep my info correct in the whois I have to protect all 3 to avoid my contant info from getting out. OR I could put seperate info on the .org and .net that were still legit but that just makes things more complicated and messy. Maybe waiting it out and fighting the spam is the way to go. Dennis

I recently started hosting my 3 domains at TCH and love it. I also moved my registrar from namesdirect over to TCH's secureserver.net partner? I believe this is the name and I believe they are a partner of TCH. In any account I am not so happy with the registrar. After just a few days of moving to the new registrar I started getting spam to the email address I listed at the registrar. This was a brand new never used email account that I created just for the registrar. I hosted my 3 domains at namesdirect for years and never once got a spam to the email I had listed there. I am not sure if the spam came as a result of the registrar selling or sharing my email address (NOT VERY LIKELY) so I can only assume that the spam is coming from my email address and info being listed in the public WHOIS database. Why I never got a spam when my registrar was namesdirect is a mystery but I do know that I don't feel I should have to pay $9 a year for every domain to be listed as private. That is something that really gets to me that I have to pay not to have my info listed. I have the same complaint with having to pay the damn phone company not to list my info as well. Anyway, I realize I am not going to change the way this works but am hoping to find another solution than paying $9 a year per domain. 1. Possibly find another registrar that offers privacy for free? 2. List BS info in my public whois info? The problem with this option is that the registrar itself will not be able to contact me. Since it appears the registrar partner of TCH does not have a seperate area to define an email for them to reach me and a seperate email for the public whois. 3. ? Any have some better suggestions? Dennis

That is not normal, here is what mine always looks like: Does it seem to work besides the odd error? Does your spam get deleted and does your files increase in size in the .spamassassin folder? I am not sure if this matters but is your scripts formatted in UNIX or PC or Dos? Mine are all UNIX ANSI. Line 1558 in the Conf.pm file refers to the section of bayes autolearn feature. Can you verify that your user_prefs file in your .spamassassin folder looks like this: And also verify that your user_prefs file is UNIX ANSI format. The easiest way to determine this and fix this is to use textpad and open the file then change format to UNIX ANSI and save as to desktop then delete your copy in your ftp and upload the new file. Dennis

Thanks Lisa, I did understand that the quota is an umbrella. My main question was what happened to email usage if you go over your umbrella quota. Some hosts send out a warning some stop all service all together. The reason I ask is on a few occoasions I need to do a full back up of my site but do not have the ability yet to have the backup sent via ftp to another site. Since my current site runs at 60% full when I do a full backup I immediately go over my quota until I finish downloading the full back up tar file. I was curious if any emails came in while I downloaded what would happen. So now I will do my full backups late at night to avoid loss of email. Dennis

Your usage is listed on cPanel. On the left side it will be listed like this: Disk usage 221.49 Megabytes SQL Disk usage 0.00 Megabytes Disk space available 228.51 Megabytes I am curious, what happens if your site quota goes over its alloted space, and all of my users are well under their email quota. Do they still get their email even though my site is over its usage? Will they get an email saying they are over their email quota even though it is really the site usage that is the problem? Dennis

Nate, Good point on the cron job. Here is what you need to do: assuming you have already made the scripts and moved them to your cgi-bin folder and have chmod them to 755 TO CREATE A CRON JOB TO RUN YOUR SCRIPTS 1. Login to cPanel 2. Click on Cron Jobs 3. Click on Standard 4. In the "Command to run:" field type the path to your script: /home/yourcpaneluserid/public_html/cgi-bin/saspam.sh 5. Choose the times you want this to run: Minute: 0 Hours: 22 Days: Every Day Months: Every Month Weekday: Monday Using these settings your script will run every Monday at 10pm SERVER TIME 6. Click on Save Crontab note: I put server time because the time on the server may not be the same time in your time zone. The best way to determin the difference is to upload a file to your ftp and check the timestamp and comare to your timezone. For me 10pm server time is actually 5am my time. I like my scripts to run at 5am so that I am not still moving email around and the chances of someone I know sending me a legit email at that time is rare so the spam script is safe to run without worrying if SA happened to mark a legit email as spam and my spam script killed it before I could check it. Once your script runs the cron job results will be emailed to the email address you have setup in your cpanel under contact information. You can verify that by modifying this url to match your domain: http://******:2082/frontend/bluelagoon/contact/index.html Repeat the steps above to setup a seperate cron job for your ham script. Or you can combine both scripts into one file and set the cron to just run that file. Dennis note: I have updated my original post to add this info

Steve, You should be able to fix this yourself without needing to use the helpdesk. Your chmod on the directories looks good. It sounds like you are just missing your default_pref file. Just copy it from the original squirrelmail package data folder. If needed download a fresh zipped package from www.squirrelmail.org and you will find this file in the data directory. Then make sure that the chmod for that file is 644 After setting everything up and before your very first login to squirrelmail the default_pref should be the only file in your data directory. Once you login, squirrelmail reads that default_pref file and uses its defaults to create a unique data file for each user that logs in. Dennis

I originally thought the same but that does not seem to be true. I was told by helpdesk that if I want to email my default account I would email myuserid@server74.totalchoicehosting.com I verified this by emailing myuserid@**** and the email goes to whatever email I specified in my catchall. Since I have that set to blackhole then I dont get the email. As soon as I changed the catchall email to an account then any email sent to myuserid@**** goes there. Which happens with any email address that is not defined as a forwarder or does not exist as a mailbox. Dennis

I think I figured it out. There is no quota on our main accounts. The quota is the site quota. And sure enough I was over 90% of my entire site usage. So apparantly you will get an email to your main account in cpanel when your whole site usage approaches it maximum. Good to know. I assumed we would get an email from TCH as well but maybe just the email about email quota is sent and no email about site usuage is sent? This finally makes sense since I never have even one email in my main cpanel webmail account. I wonder if I go over my entire disk space available if every user on my domain gets an email about their quota? Dennis

yeah, that was one of the first things I checked. I even checked the actual file sizes from ftp and each was empty. Do you know what the quota is in the first place on our main accounts? I cannot seem to find where this is shown or saved at. Dennis

Wow, is this true? That users can bypass their quota by moving mail out of their inbox to another folder they create on the server? For instance I use squirrelmail for all my users and they have many folders they use for organization. If they move a ton of their email to a folder outside of inbox then those emails are not counted anymore against quota? Dennis

my default email account is: myuserid@server74.totalchoicehosting.com I am trying to setup a forwarder like this myuserid@**** >>> myuserid but it does not create. I can set any other email I want to forward to myuserid but not myuserid@****? Anyone know why this is? Can someone test this on their account? Just create a forwarder of [yourcpaneluserid]@server[yournumber].totalchoicehosting.com >>> yourcpaneluserid Dennis

pretty cool, I actually have a "guide" now on these forums As far as hits goes. SA assigns a score to each email it sees based on many tests it performs. For more details on the tests it does on an email see spamassassin.org. IF you want to see the score, just click on view headers from which ever email program you use. It will look something like this: To set your threshold you can do it from cpanel. A safe number is between 6 and 8. For how to setup auto learn and bayes see my guide which Jandafields pointed out. Dennis

I got the same error. I ran from cron and also ran via php script. Both gave the same error. I assume it means one or more files it did not have access to. I have one file in on of my directories owned by root and it never appears in my backups. So I assume the error was from that. Dennis

I got an odd email today from my default email address set in cpanel saying: But what is odd, is I logged into my main account and there were no emails. The account is completely empty. I even checked via ftp. What is the quota set to for our default accounts? How can we change it? Any idea why I would have gotten this email? Dennis

Maybe you have been using SA for a long enough time for it to know who your friends are. I am on week 3 now so maybe in a few months I can drop the score to 5. At first a lot of legit email was scoring above 5 now only a few are. Dennis

ahh, makes sense, mr. Fields I presume? Dennis

wow, very aggressive. I get emails all the time from family and friends that score 5 and even up to 5.5. You are not losing legit email at that score? Dennis

ahh, thats why it kept failing for me. Linux is so backwards or is it Windows is so backwards? hehe Thanks Janda, your like my personal trainer on these forums. Dennis

I too am skeptical which is why I am curious if anyone has used this yet. However I do know that reading the actual email is only one test of many. It could be the exact email you list above, but lets say the link that they are sending you to could be on a known spam list which would nail it right there. Or lets say the email comes from a known public proxy that sends spam causing even more points towards being spam. Then there is the md5 value, if a spammer is sending the same message to many people it will have a numerical value based on how many characters and spaces and there is one test this program uses that checks the numerical value against an updated black list. This software has email programs around the globe that are never used so by that fact any email sent to them are spam. It then records the numerical value and maintains a database to scan against. And I am sure there are many more tests that would help even identify the email sample you listed. 99.9999% does seem outragous, but I do know that companies like valueweb.com deploy this and the numbers are so good for catching legit emails that they implement it server wide and auto delete spam. Customers have to actually elect not to have their email deleted. I have a friend who runs a realestate business and was getting on average 200+ spams a day even using spam cop as a filter. As soon as valueweb impleted Brightmail he instantly dropped to less than 10 a day. So far in several months with tons of legit email a day, he has not had one person say didn't you get my email? So maybe not 99.9999 but I would venture to guess it is in the very high 90% range. At that level I think I too would elect to have an auto delete setup. I am not sure how this compares to Spam Assassin so I am very interested if any people who have tried both. So far I am extremely happy with Spam Assassin, after switching on bayes and auto learn it seems to be getting better. I also move all my spam from my old hotmail account to my spam folder here and run my spam learn script which has been helping. I have my SA set at 8.0 since I am trying to get to a point where I can feel comfortable enough to turn on auto delete for SA. Then the ones that get through train SA and report to spam cop. Also I could be wrong, but I believe the 99.999% is actually referring to how many legit emails it will mark as spam. 1 in a million. I doubt it means it will catch 99.9999% of all spam sent to you. My guess is some spam will still get through, as even my friend still gets 10 a day. But it is so safe that you can easily auto delete the spam it catches since it will be very rare it will see a legit email as spam. Dennis

Has anyone looked into this product? It claims fewer than 1 false positive in every 1 million messages identified as spam. Sounds to good to be true. Curious if anyone has used it? http://www.brightmail.com/xsp-as-features.html Dennis

I edited the original post to reflect Rick's suggestions and also added the following critical line to the saspam.sh script chmod 660 $FILE without that line the spam file gets created with chmod 600 and as a result Spam Assassin does not have rights to send your spam mail to the spam folder. fortunately I noticed my main cpanel id mailbox was getting loaded with messages from SA telling me it was not able to deliver my spam mail because it was expecting chmod 660 but was seeing 600. Dennis

Rick, Good to know. For those of us who have chown to nobody what chmod can we use and have it still work? I have my data directory below public_html so I guess it is not so import to make it more restrictive, but would be nice to know how tight it can go without breaking it. Dennis