As we all know, Dreamhost is an EXCELLENT Hosting company as mentioned in a previous blog.
Although, I do still run into one simple issue which is the spam protection. It seems their spam filtering rules tend to overlook a large volume of the spam that I receive. After just getting tired of deleting messages constantly…I did some searching with Google and found a few threads on forwarding your Dreamhost account email to GMail. The downfall to this is the fact that you are limited to the 2GB size limit at GMail and the shaky privacy policy that Google is known for. My other issue! GMail is very strict on what kind of attachments you can send, even .zip files get kicked back. So I prefer to stick to my account at Dreamhost and find an easy way around the filtering problems.
I decided to write a filtering solution of my own that would fit the normal DreamHost customer’s need. Since Dreamhost already provides SpamAssassin and .procmailrc access, it just seemed like the right way to go about curing this issue. Within a few hours I had compiled one of the largest .procmailrc recipe configurations that I have ever seen. I found quite a few sources and it seems that this may just be the right road to take. I then placed my .procmailrc into my directory and let it go. I setup logging on each rule to follow the distribution of messages and debug any false positives. Days later, I can proudly say that it is running as intended and bug free!
I am seeing a dramatic difference in Spam messages since I put this ruleset in place. My alternative is definitely easier than compiling your own local copy of Spamassassin and MUCH less headache than forwarding your mail between DH and GMail and back.
Another big advantage over forwarding to GMail with this system. There are less points of probable failure, bandwidth utilization, CPU utilization, and less chance of mail being lost or stuck in a loop.
Below are the instructions to installing this on your own and seeing just how much of a difference it makes! This is by far, the best solution I have seen to date for Dreamhost subscribers.
The only thing needed is to login to your Dreamhost panel and click on your Mail/Junk Filter.
Once this is done you can simply click: "Enable Filter" on your domain of choice.
Afterwards, login to your webmail with Dreamhost via: http://webmail.yourdomain.com. Once in create a "Junk" folder without the quotes in your root of directories. (Not inside any other directory)
Next step is to save this file to your computer. (procmailrc)
Final step. FTP into your account and in the root folder:
Upload the "procmailrc" file. Once the file is placed in your root folder, delete your original ".procmailrc" and then simply right click and rename the procmailrc file to: ".procmailrc" . (Without The Quotes)
After this final step you should now receive any junk email to your "Junk" folder that you created earlier. Welcome to Dreamhost hosting without the Spam!!
–PLEASE NOTE–
Make sure to bookmark the file as I will be updating this regularly with new rulesets as needed. This is a work in progress and will be updated as I find more spam that is being missed.
Link is at: http://www.projectstuff.org/procmailrc
Have a great weekend!