What is BoxTrapper?

BoxTrapper is a neat application that traps every single incoming message in a queue and requires an extra verification step before that email is delivered. Unfortunately, BoxTrapper comes with its share of issues. For EVERY email that comes in, BoxTrapper will send back an email requesting verification. That means if you get 1,000 email messages a day in spam, you server will send 1,000 email verification messages a day.

- BoxTrapper and other challenge-response systems have a similar problem:
Spammers send out emails with forged "from" addresses. If your/client's email address ever gets forged as a "from" address by a Spammer you'll be in deep trouble. Lots of servers using challenge-response such as BoxTrapper will send challenge-responses to you. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of them.

Now consider what happens when a spammer forges some innocent person's email address as the "from" address on a Dictionary-Attack spam to a site on your server. Let's say Spammers try 1000 email messages to nonexistent email addresses at the domain hosted on your server. At this point your challenge-response system is going to send 1000 challenges back to that innocent person. That would make you a Spammer, which would put your server on one or more blacklists; possibly the SORBS blacklist; FYI, SORBS charges substantial fees to remove you from their blacklist. If that happens, and if you are hosting your dedicated server with us, we'll have no other choice but to shut down your server without prior notice.

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