As a 10 years as a web developer, one of the most difficult tasks I’ve seen my clients deal with is the issue of email spam. Spam emails are those annoying unsolicited messages you receive daily from all corners of the globe. Most are from senders who don’t know you who are trying to sell you Viagra or getting you to claim an inheritance from some royalty in South America or are fishing to trick you into providing your personal information.
So what can you do about it?
It’s time to trap spam using a free product you probably already have on your cPanel called… BoxTrapper.
What is BoxTrapper & How Does it Work?
BoxTrapper is a tool that filters spam from your inbox through a process called challenge-response verification, whitelisting, ignoring, and blacklist. When an account that has BoxTrapper enabled receives an email, BoxTrapper checks to see if you’ve emailed them before, checks the whitelist of good accounts, if not it will automatically send a fully customizable verification email in response. The sender must complete the verification process before the email can pass through to the inbox. In short, it traps emails that don’t follow these instructions.
But fear not, these trapped emails are not lost forever. By default, BoxTrapper will list them in a “Review Queue” to have you study and whitelist those you truly want to receive. Furthermore, you can add to the blacklist of emails or domains you never want to receive thus improving your email over time.
With spam becoming more and more of a problem for my client, I decided to try BoxTrapper for 10 days to see what I found.
Setting Up BoxTrapper
To setup BoxTrapper, you have to first log onto your cPanel (or your WebMail) and Enable BoxTrapper…
Once it has been “Enabled” you will need to check the Review Queue at least daily. This will be a daily list from which you can scan through the emails and “whitelist” and delivery emails. Those that get added to the “whitelist” will not need to be checked later. Thus over time, this task of “reviewing” will get smaller.
I have given you the very basics regarding the features of BoxTrapper. For more detail information click cPanel’s documentation here..
So My Final Thoughts After Trying BoxTrapper for 10 Days
Oh my gosh, where has this product been all my life! You never realize how much time you waste looking at spam based emails. I feel like I have recovered hours and hours of email. It feels weirds to have like 5-10 real emails each day. I love this product. I like BoxTrapper so much we will be offering BoxTrapper services to our existing clients for $5 more a month on their maintenance (for those that don’t want to review their own trapped emails).
So what are your experiences with spam? What are your experiences with BoxTrapper? What products have you found to eliminate spam? Share with us.
If there is anything I can do to help you or build you a website, let us know!