BoxTrapper Setup Guide

BoxTrapper is an industrial spam-filtering system that if used correctly can drastically reduce the volume of junk mail your account receives. This setup guide ensures that it creates the least amount of hassle possible for your existing contacts. BoxTrapper works by restricting the messages that are delivered to your account to only those contacts that are on your safe list (AKA "whitelist"). For future contacts, BoxTrapper will require that legitimate senders add themselves to your whitelist which they can do simply by replying to the email that BoxTrapper automatically sends to new senders. Since the majority of spam comes from email addresses that don't actually exist, the spammers never get the authentication messages from your BoxTrapper setup. This guide will walk you through enabling BoxTrapper on your account and whitelisting your entire address book so your existing contacts will not have to verify themselves. This guide looks rather long, but there are lots of pictures so don't be intimidated -it's well worth the time it will save you by not having to sort through hundreds of junk messages every morning! Hopefully you have basic Excel skills, but if not please call us for assistance if any of the following guide is not working for you.

1) Login to CPanel by navigating to http://yourdomain.com/cpanel and providing the username and password you received in your administrative email.

2) When successfully logged in to CPanel, you will be presented with many icons. Click the Mail icon in the top left, and then click on BoxTrapper Spam Trap near the bottom of the links on the following page.

3) You will then be presented with a list of email addresses on your domain that may or may not currently have BoxTrapper enabled. Locate your account and click the Manage link to the left of it.

If your Current Status shows enabled, then all you have to do is add your address book to the whitelist as detailed in the following steps. If it's not yet enabled, please click the Enable button.

4) Most modern email clients or address books allow you to Export all your contacts to a text file of comma-separated or tab-delimited text. We are now going to export your contacts and then massage your contact list with Excel so that it lists only email addresses. Open your email client (like Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird) or Address Book (if it's separate from your email client) and choose File > Export... from the top bar. You will be presented with a list of options for export. Choose Comma-separated Values or Tab-delimited Text (see screenshots below for your email client). If you are unsure how to export your contacts you can use the Help menu that comes with your email client and search for "export contacts," or search for instructions on Google, or phone us!

Microsoft Entourage:

Microsoft Outlook:

Outlook Express:

5) Save the file somewhere and remember where you saved it (on your Desktop or in My Documents, etc.). Open Microsoft Excel, and open the file you exported by clicking on File > Open... and locating your contacts export.

You should get a spreadsheet with some labels across the top. One of the columns should hopefully list all of your email addresses (see screenshot).

6) Next we need to clean up this contacts export so that the ONLY thing in this spreadsheet is a list of emails. If you click on the 1st row label it will select the entire top row that has all of headings like "Phone," "First Name," etc. Then click Edit > Delete and it will remove that row. Do the same for all of the vertical columns except the column with the email addresses we want. This shoud leave you with something like the screenshot below...

7) Almost done! Next we are going to add "from" before every address. Click on the first email address in your list and then click on Insert > Columns. This will add an empty column to the left of your email addresses.

In cell A1 (top left cell), type "from" (without the quotes) and copy it down the entire column by dragging the bottom right corner of the select box straight down the list.

8) Great! Now we are going to make it look like a whitelist for boxtrapper. In cell C1, type or copy and paste the following line exactly:

=CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1)

9) Next, select C1 again and copy it down the length of the C column the same way you copied the A column (drag the bottom right corner of the select box straight down to the end of your email address list).

10) The final step is to save the entire C column to your BoxTrapper whitelist. To do this select the entire C column and copy it and paste it into the BoxTrapper White List Editor window (see below).

Your list should look something like the screenshot above. Click Save at the bottom and you are done!