Be careful when getting Spam Box enabled...

[walker]

I've used Spam Assassin's Spam Box feature for two years with another host (modhost). It means I can login from time to time with Horde and ensure no valid emails were accidentally filtered as spam. Bluehost won't let you enable the Spam Box because apparently their users get confused by it. But I was told that, if specifically asked, they would do it. So I did.

And then my email account went strangely quiet...for twenty-four hours. Getting a little suspicious this morning after finding that a Malaysian friend supposedly sent three emails that didn't arrive, I logged in and what do you know? "Spam Box" isn't enabled.

So when "Peter F." said "I have enabeled Spam Box for you" -- what did he mean exactly? He clearly did *something*.

When checking the email filters, I found out. He'd marked all mail with a certain spam assassin header to be deleted. Blackholed. No chance of being retrieved. Gone. For good. Bye bye.

It seems to me that technical support staff need to be told the difference between "Spam Box" (a cPanel feature) and "sending email to oblivion". Implementing the latter without being clear about what you did is not nice, and undoubtedly resulted in the loss of those emails from Malaysia. And hopefully no others.

Incidentally, I've figured out a little hack that lets you enable the Spam Box yourself. I shouldn't have to do that, but obviously, I'm not going to trust technical support staff with fiddling with email features again.