Email Security on VPS

[RLPVT]

Not sure if this is correct forum but I was hoping to get some suggestions. I have been on a VPS for my site for a year now and until recently the standard SPAM filtering under the basic CP Panel was fine using the standard Spam Assassin and and bogofilter settings. I recently have seen a large uptick in volume from spam and some is getting through even though I have marked them as spam in the control panel.

When I was under shared hosting I had a much more robust way of block based on key words in the emails and blocking at the domain level of the email address,

I have nothing like that now. I am not a VPS expert at all so I though maybe some of you guys might have some suggestions on adding or installing something better or if that is even possible,

I have googled quite a bit but nothing solid. Any ideas or suggestions out there?

[Dmacleo]

cpanel (iirc) allows blocking by domain under the user level filtering I think.

not sure on keywords.

edit:

found this posted somewheres and it matches my memory of it

• In cPanel, under the Mail section, click on Account Level Filtering.
• Click the Create New Filter button.
• Give the filter a name (something like, "Discard Spammy Email").
• In the Rules box, there will be two drop-downs and a text box
• In the first drop-down select "From", then "equal", and in the text box, enter the bad email address
• Under actions, select "Discard Message"
• Click the "Activate" button

[RLPVT]

I wasn't correct in my naming of what I am using for my control panel. Using kloxo which stinks btw.

Maybe I need to get another one installed?

[Dmacleo]

oh yeah I hate kloxo. and do they even support centos 6.x 64 bit yet?

on vps cpanel license only 14 a month so may be worth it to you.

some free ones work ok but difficult to setup, directadmin and cpanel not free but setup is easy.

[Aiwa]

Webmin. Easy and free.

[RLPVT]

Cpanel isn't free but you get what you pay for I guess. Do they have better spam filtering set ups that allow domain specific email blocking?

webmin seems more for the more experienced developer which isn't me lol

[Nevo]

I'll give you an idea of what cPanel is like. Yes, you pay for it, but with paying for such a great service come ease of mind and great features. In order to find out if its the best for you, I highly encourage you to visit the Live DEMO offered on their website: https://cpanel.net/demo/

I personally don't have any spam filtering setup for my cPanel and spam isn't an issue.

[Martin A.]

Or ISPConfig, which is also free and easy. I used that the first months when I had a VPS, till I figured it's a bit overkill to have a complicated control panel on a single-site server. Found it easier to move the email hosting to someone who does that better than I did (Google Apps, in my case, which was free at that time), set up LigHTTPD, PHP-FCGI and MySQL manually, configured iptables to only allow connections to port 80 and my custom SSH port.

In my opinion cPanel and/or email handing requires more resources than what it's worth, resources that could be used to make your site faster.

[Dmacleo]

ispconfig decent enough to use but setup (install) is much more complicated than cpanel. with cpanel its run cmd to d/l the sh file, run that file. installing ispconfig takes a lot of commands.

I was using it recently on a vps to test and found, on average, was using approx 200mb more ram than cpanel vps version with options/services matching as close to each other as I could.

but it was free too so at that point its judgement call.

cpanel made a lot of improvements over last year or so for resources, panels help adding email/ftp accounts to different domains, but if only the one domain on vps then no panel worth looking at too. and thats a good learning experience also.

[RLPVT]

only the one domain on vps then no panel worth looking at too. and thats a good learning experience also.

Can you clarify that part for me? I only have one domain so it's not worth it ? I did the Cpanel demo and it has domain level specific email filtering and specific actions when those rules are detected. I liked the layout.

[Dmacleo]

i mean if you don't have to worry about setting stuff up for other domains then run w/o a panel and use ssh/sftp to edit files as needed.

just install centos (or preferred distro) and run LAMP stack.

is not comfortable trying then a panel is probably your best bet.in all honesty a decent panel does make stuff easier, you just need to make sure you know what your restrictions are. with cpanel if you want to use nginx on domain then the cpxstack works well but you need to remember there are some things you can do on a non panel server that you cannot on a panel one.

[IveLeft...]

If you have a VPS with CPanel then you could add some extra stuff like mailscanner etc

See here as CFS offer this as a service to install and set up (CFS offer their firewall free and its excellent)

We use mailscanner and all the plugins like CFS suggest in their instal package - works a treat on our shared hosting platform