Recently the Spam Assassin app has deprecated one of its update repositories and this has been generating errors and sending emails to the Plesk Administrator. You will see the following error show up in your Inbox:

channel: no 'mirrors.sought.rules.yerp.org' record found, channel failed
12-Mar-2021 04:43:09: SpamAssassin: Update available, but download or extract failed

Please note that even though its showing a failure, there are secondary repositories which are subsequently tried and do in fact update Spam Assassin. So long story short there is no action required.

Resolution

In this case there is no further action required from the Plesk Administrator and our Support Team at Conetix are addressing the issue.

We will remove the offending repository shortly to prevent further emails being generated.

This does not seem to be an issue with Plesk per se but with the OS, Centos7 and only affects this OS. Users on Centos 8 are not affected. If you would like to see more technical information please visit this link:

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7019549

SpamAssassin is a free spam filter preinstalled in Plesk that help to eliminate unwanted spam emails.

It works by scanning emails before they reach your inbox and scores them in relation to a scale set by you within Control Panel, then either tags or deletes spam, depending on your setting.

There is some trial and error in setting the spam filter sensitivity scale for the right tolerance so that the right emails are getting through and the spam is getting blocked. The following steps outline how to train the filter to your requirements.

Instructions

1. Once you have logged in to Control Panel click on the ” Mail ” tab. Click on the mail box where you’d like to set up Spam Assassin. For this example we’ll use info@conetixtest.com
   
2. Click on Spam Filter.
   
3. Tick “Switch on spam filtering for this email address” then select “Mark Spam messages by adding the following text to message subject” and give a meaningful name in the field.
    
4. Under Advanced settings, set the “Spam filter sensitivity” to a value either 4 or 5 to begin with.
5. You can also add certain email addresses and domain names to the White list (always deliver) and Black list (always block).  In this example, conetix.com.au has been added to the White list so all mail from conetix.com.au will always be delivered. Click “OK”.
6. In the email application on your computer you should see spam emails tagged with the “***SPAM***” tag, and legitimate emails with a normal subject heading. This example is using Microsoft Outlook 2010.
   If you notice that spam is still getting through untagged, or legitimate mail is getting tagged as spam, you’ll need to change the sensitivity accordingly in step 4.
   
7. If you are satisfied that spam is being tagged, and legitimate mail is not, you can opt to log back into the control panel and under the Spam Filter settings change the settings to “Delete all spam messages”.
   

   Now all future mail that would have been tagged as SPAM will be automatically deleted.