How to Deal: Legitimate Email Went Into Junk Folder on Plesk Linux

Recently some legitimate emails went into junk or spam folder on Plesk Linux. This case usually happen within Signetique customer, which has most of shared Plesk Linux.

The Case : Customer confused how come legitimate email marked as spam or went into Junk folder.

The solution is let see how the email headers flow first.

Picture above, example of spam scoring system. It is saying that the email is catogorised as spam where the score is 15.3 and required email to be marked as spam is 6.3. That’s a good logic.

However, recent case is : Incoming email marked as spam by spam assassin, but the mail spam score is 1, and it is required 0 score to be marked by spam by system. If you can see, the mail is not indicated as spam, but why required score is 0? Something wrong.

Refer to Plesk support, you can reconfigure the spam filter setting to higher value. But, customer default spam score is 7, but why on email header stated as 0?

Now check the current settings for particular user first

/usr/local/psa/bin/spamassassin -i email@users

Now we need to unlock the spam settings in particular user first. I usually use command line to do this.

/usr/local/psa/bin/spamassassin -u email@users -status false

Then ask customer to send email again. The mail should go in. After a successful attempt, we can re-apply again the spam score for particular user email account.