You'll want to log in to your hosting account to make any of the changes discussed here.
A hint about setting up your default email that may help you out first.
When you sign up for a domain, your chosen user name becomes the default email account. So if your domain is samplesite.com, and your user name is samplesite, then your default email is samplesite@samplesite.com - which is almost always the first guess that spammers use when they find a new domain. So the default email, if identical, almost always gets the first spam to the account.
Also commonly-used accounts for admin@samplesite.com, manager@, sales@, info@, webmaster@, contact@ and help@ are easily-guessed. So, for future reference, if you sign up for a domain, use something ELSE as your login that doesn't match the domain name, and is not on the "easy to guess" list. An easy thing to do is to use numbers to replace letters - so "samplesite" might become "samp1esite" or even "sampl3sit3".
Now, logged in to your control panel, you'll want to click on E-mail Management. Then check your Spamassassin setup. The first thing it tells you is whether or not Spamassassin is enabled - if it's not, you'll definitely want to do so. Under "Where do you want the spam to go?" We recommend that you choose the option to delete the spam, especially since you're already getting quite a bit of it. We DO NOT recommend sending it to your catch-all account unless you are willing to regularly clean out that account! Most people forget about that account, and it fills up very quickly, eventually taking up all the disk space and then you go over your limits and the account gets suspended. Which is why we really don't recommend you use a catch-all account at all. Next, you're asked "What score threshold do you wish to use?" Spamassassin works by scoring emails - assigning points for things that appear in many spam emails. After many users and tests, we find that the "Low Threshold" option of 5 works for almost everyone. Some of us have actually gotten great results using 4.5.
Then you're asked, "Would you like to delete high scoring spam?" Most people at first do not delete it (choose "No, do not block high scoring spam.") but instead use one of the options after this question so they can review the emails. When they are comfortable thinking that no important emails are being lost, then they switch this option over to "Yes" and just let the spam vanish.
"Do you wish to rewrite the subject of a spam email?" We recommend if you are NOT having them deleted that you set this to YES so you can easily see those with *****SPAM***** in the header.
"How should the spam be delivered?" is pretty self-explanatory.
You then have options to blacklist and whitelist specific email addresses. These can be changed over time, especially if you find email from a specific person being marked as Spam when it's not.
Be sure you SAVE your settings after this.
Back at the main E-mail management settings in your control panel, you have another option for "E-mail filters" which gives you specific options as well to block email from specific addresses, block email which contains specific words, and also has an "Enable adult filter" option which should be turned on. You'll want the filter to drop the email that it catches.
One other thing you should be doing for your account is in the "Catch All E-Mail" section. You should have your "Set Catch All E-Mail" settings selected to "Fail." This takes those emails that are sent to non-existing accounts and bounces them before they even hit the filters. It reduces your bandwidth usage and wear and tear on your server. Spammers send out email to all of those "common" addresses I listed above, and if they don't come back, they assume the address is a working one, and sell it to everyone else they can. But if it bounces back, then they have to try again.
These are the suggestions we have to help you out. Hopefully they'll help reduce the amount of spam you're receiving.
