How do I manage greylisting on cPanel?

Before you begin

Greylisting temporarily delays some incoming messages to evaluate a new sender and sending-server combination.

Greylisting is one of the anti-spam techniques designed to handle unwanted messages and protect users against spam. This technique works by temporarily rejecting messages and emails received from an email sending server. The goal is to verify the legitimacy of the sending server before allowing the original message to be delivered to the destination mail server. If the sending server is legitimate, it will typically retry sending the message until it is accepted and delivered to the recipient. Greylisting checks three elements: the sending mail server's IP address (SMTP), the sending email address, and the recipient's email address. If all three criteria are verified, the message is accepted and forwarded.

Manage Greylisting on cPanel

To enable the filter, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your cPanel account.
2. Open the Email section and click Configure Greylisting.

3- On the next page, you will see that Greylisting is enabled by default, which is a good setting.

If you wish to disable it, you can do so at any time from your cPanel interface by clicking the "disable" button.

Check the result and troubleshoot

A legitimate mail server generally retries delivery. If an urgent message is delayed, review delivery logs and retries before disabling protection. Greylisting is separate from content filtering and does not guarantee spam-free mail.