Global Email Filters in cPanel: one rule for every mailbox on your domain

The short answer: cPanel has two kinds of filter. Mailbox filters (Email Filters, or the ones in webmail) only apply to that mailbox. Global filters (Global Email Filters) apply to all mail arriving at the account, before it reaches any mailbox. They are the right tool when one rule has to hold for the whole team: blocking a persistent sender, refusing a kind of message, diverting a subject.

Global filter or mailbox filter?

	Global filter	Mailbox filter
Where you create it	cPanel, Global Email Filters	cPanel, Email Filters, or in webmail
Which mail it applies to	All mail arriving at the account	Only that mailbox's mail
Who manages it	Whoever has cPanel access	The mailbox owner, in webmail
Good for	Company-wide rules	Sorting one person's mail into folders

To sort one person's mailbox into folders, use the webmail filters: creating filters in Roundcube.

Creating a global filter

1	Log in to cPanel and, in the Email section, open Global Email Filters. Create a new filter and give it a name that says what it does.

2	Write the condition: pick the field (sender, subject, recipient, body, a header), the comparison (contains, equals, begins with) and the text.

3	Pick the action: for example, fail with a message to the sender, redirect to an address, or discard.

4	Test before you trust it. The filters page has an area where you can test a sample message and see which filter catches it and what it does.

Examples that make sense

Problem	Condition	Action
A sender who will not stop, and writes to everyone	Sender contains their address	Fail with a message (they learn it is not accepted)
Quote requests arrive at any address	Subject contains "quote"	Redirect to sales@
A spam run with the same subject in every mailbox	Subject equals the campaign text	Redirect to a quarantine mailbox, and only later discard

"Discard" leaves no trace. A discarded message goes to no folder, does not go back to the sender and cannot be recovered. A loosely written condition (subject contains "invoice", say) can make legitimate mail vanish for the whole company. Start by redirecting to a quarantine mailbox for a few days, and only then switch to discard.

For spam in general, global filters are not the first step. The cPanel spam filter, with the spam folder turned on, catches far more with less risk: see how to stop spam reaching your mailbox. Keep global filters for the specific cases the spam filter misses.

If a message goes missing and you suspect a filter, Track Delivery in cPanel shows what happened to each message that reached the server.

A rule that does not do what you expected, or mail that disappeared? Open a ticket with an example.

Open a support ticket

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