SpamBT™ - BoxTrapper Technology
Processes spam on our mail servers - not on your computer! Server-side challenge-response email filtering tool
• BoxTrapper allows emails from senders on your whitelist to proceed directly to your inbox.
• All other senders are checked to see if they are coming from a real human before being released to your inbox.
• You can easily edit your whitelist any time you want. • BoxTrapper can be turned on or off with the click of a mouse in your cpanel or webmail interface
• Boxtrapper does its work on our servers, as opposed to other methods that download all the spam and filter it locally on your computer. The server-side processing is particularly
useful when you're accessing your email away from your office or home.
• SpamBT BoxTrapper is included free with every hosting plan
This page contains:
• Overview of Boxtrapper
• Quickstart recommended most common steps to set up BoxTrapper on your mail account.
• Features & definitions • Manage your settings • Troubleshooting Definitions
• Spam - unwanted junk mail
• BoxTrapper - mailsystem software on the servers that processes and sorts spam before it gets to your inbox.
• WhiteList - People you want to receive email from (e.g., your address book entries)
• BlackList - Address list that BoxTrapper accumulates as unwanted spam sender addresses
• Challenge - When your mailbox receives an email from someone not yet on either of your White or Black lists,
BoxTrapper will "challenge" the sender (to see if s/he is
"human") by sending a polite form email (which is editable by you) to ask them to reply. If they reply, then the original
was made, the message will sit in the BoxTrapper queue for 15 days (a selectable number, by you) for your potential review in case a mistake was made. If a new correspondent sends email to you for the first time, they only have to encounter a
Challenge email once- thereafter they are on the WhiteList and their email message immediately is conveyed to your inbox. • Verify/Verification - The email message and process by which BoxTrapper sends the Challenge message to the sender to see if s/he is human.
Overview
We all hate spam. Here's how to minimize it:
1. Protect your address: Stop/minimize your email address from getting in spam address list databases in the first place 2. Filter these pesky emails when you do receive them-- an effective method is to use SpamBT Boxtrapper.
BoxTrapper (BT, also an abbreviation for Bacillus thuringiensis which is an organic control for garden caterpillars, essentially a bug killer) is software that runs on the servers to minimize the spam messages that get through to your inbox. This is
accomplished by a filter mechanism that you choose how it operates. When Boxtrapper is enabled, Email sent to your mailbox is either:
• Transferred directly to your inbox (because the sender's address was on your whitelist). Your whitelist is an
accumulation of good email addresses from your address book, from having sent a message outward to a particular email
address (using our smtp server), or manually maintained/edited by you.
• Ignored or deleted or placed in a spam wastebasket
(depending on how you set up boxtrapper, based on identifying the sender's address as a spammer, or keywords in the
message or subject line match spam profiles - it "smells like spam")
• Temporarily held (in a waiting queue which you can
manually peruse and manipulate) while a reply email message (a "challenge message") is sent to the sender to have them confirm they are human by simply replying (no content is needed in the reply). Spam senders will not reply to such a
message. Once the challenge response is received, the original email is released to your inbox.
Note: To be able to use boxtrapper, you need to have a mailbox in your account on the server. If you only have a FORWARDER set up in your Cpanel MAIL settings, Boxtrapper cannot
intercept the messages. (Independently and perhaps confusingly, Boxtrapper has the feature to be able to
additionally FORWARD messages that it permits through to your mailbox, but it's unclear what the difference between BT forwards and the mailsystem's forwards.)
Please be careful that you "prime" (initialize) your Whitelist with your addressbook and especially the exact email address from which mailing list or other automated messages originate from.
Quickstart steps to enable BoxTrapper • Login to your Control Panel
• Enter the Mail section by clicking on the Mail Icon • Click on the BoxTrapper Spam Trap option.
• Click the Manage link towards the right hand side of the screen for the email address that you want to enable
BoxTrapper for.
• Click the ENABLE button to turn on BoxTrapper for the account.
• As a last step (highly reccomended) you will want to turn on Automatic Whitelisting. To do this click the Configure
Settings link towards the bottom left of the BoxTrapper
Configuration screen and then click the check box for Enable Automatic Whitelisting.
• Always test your email boxes, forwarders, and spam
software. Check occasionally your challenge queue, whitelists, and event log to see if there's anything strange happening. How to Enable SpamBT Boxtrapper
Cpanel> Mail> BoxTrapper Spam Trap> (select the email box and ENABLE it)
To enter your Cpanel, you'll need to use your hosting account (FTP) username and password.
Manage the settings for your mailbox BoxTrapper processing: • Configure Settings:
o Email addresses going to this account - These are the addresses that you have configured to be intercepted by BT for this collection of settings.
o How many days should logs and messages in queue be kept - When BT intercepts a message that from an address which is not on any of its lists (Ignore, Black, or White), it sends a challenge message. It makes note of this transaction in the Log, but also puts the message in its Queue. It stays in the
queue list until (a) the number of days expires; or (b) the sender responds; or (c) you manually delete it from the queue. You can review messages that are pending in the queue. This number of days parameters tells BT how long you want to keep messages for reviewing (and also they are still alive to be responded to). Typically people use a setting of 15-30 days. If you get lots of spam that has large attachments, then this will run up your disk quota faster (but it's not a big factor usually).
o Enable Automatic Whitelisting - (What this really means is, Do you want BoxTrapper to add someone to your whitelist when they successfully respond to the automatically sent Challenge message)
o Confirmation Messages - This is the text of the challenge message that is sent when the FROM address is not on any of your lists (Ignore, Black, or White). You can edit this to be more friendly or specific to your own style.
• Edit Lists:
o Forward List - If the email account for which you have boxtrapper enabled is not your normal emailbox, BT offer the option of forwarded "approved" messages. (Approved means those that are whitelisted or those who have responded to the challenge message.) Usually the Forward list is just the one email address for the inbox that you read. Example: you have an info@... mailbox for which you set up BT. You enable BT's
forward list to forward (hopefully) non-spam messages to your own mailbox.
o White List - The WhiteList is a list of email addresses (or permitted keywords in Subject lines etc.) that you want
BoxTrapper to permit incoming mail to be conveyed to your inbox immediately. The WhiteList is populated via: you, the owner, manually typing (or pasting) in your address book or
individual entries; if you use our outgoing SMTP mailserver, then the TO address(es) in any email you send out are recorded in the WhiteList as "friendly" (you can go back and delete any mistakes or changes of heart!); The WhiteList is also populated from senders who REPLY to the Challenge message sent.
Recommended Examples: (tbs)
o Black List - When an email comes in from this set of email addresses or keyword matches, a reply message is sent
(similar to the Challenge message) with an opportunity to
REPLY to answer the challenge. The incoming email message is not conveyed to your inbox(unless the sender REPLIES). The message is kept in the Review Queue area for "15" days. Recommended Examples: (tbs)
o Ignore List - Similar to BlackList (the incoming email
message is not conveyed to your inbox) - when an email comes in from this set of email addresses or keyword matches, no reply message is sent. The message is kept in the Review Queue area for "15" days.
Recommended Examples: Subject: Viagra
• Review Log - This is a very detailed list of every incoming email "event" that has happened in the recent past, and how Boxtrapper handled it. Viewing this list is helpful if you're curious how/when a particular message was categorized or handled.
• Review Queue - We suggest that you keep a link (shortcut icon) to your Cpanel BoxTrapper area on your desktop so you can weekly browse your collected spam messages for
messages that you really wanted to receive. If you see a message in this list that you want, you check it and click on SUBMIT which immediately release the message to be sent to your own inbox and it simultaneously puts the email address in your WhiteList. You can create a shortcut icon on your desktop by dragging to your desktop the little emblem just to the left of the web address URL near the top of your browser window. Then in the future when you click on that desktop shortcut, your browser will open to the boxtrapper page (perhaps you may need to enter your account username/password).
Possible mis-categorizations of email messages, and what to do:
• An important email was sent from someone not yet on your WhiteList, and the sender (for whatever reason) does not reply to answer the challenge message. You can view your "Queue" of messages held back by BoxTrapper and manually release (and add to whitelist) or delete them.
• A spam email made it through to your inbox, due to an answered challenge reply - (we want to know about these, please forward them to us) You can include additional keywords in your Blacklist
• A spam (or virus) email made it through to your inbox, due to a forged FROM (sender's) address that was on your WhiteList - This is likely a virus that had "collected" the sender's email address from an address list (beware: always use BCC when sending to more than 2 or 3 people, even if they're all close friends)
• If you have a WEB FORM that sends email to your account, beware that, depending on how you have your web form set up, BoxTrapper will challenge the email. The question is whom will it challenge? There are two cases:
o If your web form is set up to appear to come from your customer who filled in their own email on your web form, then there will be a challenge message to that customer's email. They (your customer, the creator of the web form inquiry) may not recognize (1) the email address (your email)that the web form is finally filtered down to, or (2) that their having filled out a web form technically/procedurally results in an email having been sent to you. Our recommendation is to re-label the web form input text field name (so it still comes thru, e.g. misspell it to distinguish it from the commonly used label of "email"), but the formmail utility you use will mark it as coming from the server. (but see below)
o If your web form is set up to essentially come from "no one" then the challenge will end up somewhere in our server: unread and un-responded-to. A solution is to fill out a test trial of your web form, then go into the BoxTrapper Queue and whitelist the resulting test message, and hopefully (depending on your formmail software) all the subsequent web form
inquiries will be whitelisted because the email FROM address will be the same.
