How do I manage the global email filters in cPanel?

Introduction

The Email filtering is a process that lets you instruct your email service to filter certain emails according to specially configured filtering rules. In other words, if you don't want to receive emails from someone or want to reject messages with a certain subject, you need an email filter. cPanel provides filtering on two levels. The first is globally for all email accounts you have created for all your domains, or basically for any message sent to an email account associated with one of your domains. The second one is email account level filtering, which allows you to filter emails only for selected email accounts. In the following lines of this tutorial we will look at the function "Global Email Filtering" from cPanel.

Access the "Filter global email" function in cPanel

To manage the email filters for all email accounts associated with your domains, you must first access the Access cPanel service for your web hosting account.

After logging in, you need to select the "Global Email Filters" feature of cPanel. You can find it in the "Email" category. Click on "Global Email Filters".

You will now be redirected to the default "Global Email Filters" page. Depending on whether you have already configured "Global Email Filters" or not, you will see a complete list of these filters.

Add new global email filter

Let's start with adding a new global email filter. To do that, click the "Create new filter" button located at the top of the Global Email Filters page.

This action will take you to a new page where you will see some configuration options. Let's take a look at them:

Filter name: The name of the filter you want to add. Please note that the name of the filter must be unique, as it identifies the filter in the measures of filters you can add.

Rules: To instruct the email service to filter a message, you must first define rules by which messages will be filtered. Please note that you can have as many filters as you want and you can add or remove rules using the buttons next to each filter.

Actions: This option allows you to configure the action that the email service performs for emails that match the previously configured rules. The following actions are available:

Discard message: This option instructs the mail server to discard all messages that match one of the previously configured rules.

Redirect to e-mail address: This option instructs the mail server to redirect all messages that match one of the previously configured rules.

Error with message: This option causes all emails that match the rules you set to be rejected, but the sender receives an error message.

Stop editing the rules: This option skips all configured rules.

Deliver to folder: This option instructs the mail server to deliver messages only to a specific folder.

Forward to a program: This option causes all messages matching the created filters to be forwarded to a script in your web hosting account.

When you are done with the configuration, click the button "Create", which is displayed at the bottom of the page.

When creating the filter, cPanel will display a success message or a message about errors that you need to fix before adding the filter.

Manage existing global email filters in cPanel

The next area you will see on the default Global Email Filters page is the Current Filters area. Here you can see a list of the e-mail filters that have already been created. For each filter you can use the functions "Edit" or "Delete" use

Click the "Edit" link right next to the function name to edit an existing global email filter.

This action will take you to the same configuration page we already discussed when adding a new filter. However, the settings for this filter are already filled in, so you can change them according to your needs. When you have made all the changes, don't forget to click at the bottom of the page on "Save" to click.

To delete an existing global e-mail filter, please click the link "Delete"which appears directly after the Edit link.

cPanel then prompts you to confirm the deletion of the filter on a new page. After that, cPanel returns to the default "Global Email Filters" page.

Congratulations! You now know how to manage the "Global Email Filters" for your entire web hosting account. Please note that these files apply to every email account you have configured for one of your domain names. If you want to filter messages for a specific email account, please see our other tutorial: Manage email filters in cPanelwhere we explain how to set up and manage filters for a specific email account.