September 9, 2006

Boxtrapper

As of today, Boxtrapper has been shut down on all servers. This challenge-response system has been causing problems with reporting one of our mail servers as a spamming server. This is wrong. It is in fact caused by the challenge response system (Boxtrapper). For more information please see this article. Click here. If you believe you are not receiving mail and it may be caused by Boxtrapper, please contact support.

Boxttrapper is a program that requires the sender of an email to validate that they are a real person by sending a second email in response to a message received after they have sent the first. It is a classic challenge-response type of program.

Other reasons spam reporting can happen are autoresponders, forwarders,  and incorrect mail settings. If you are contacted by a spamtrap IP and you respond to it by way of an autoresponder, you could be tagged as a spammer. Similarly, if you forward your email, and you are forwarding spam, you could also be tagged as a spammer.

For proper spam prevention go to your cPanel control panel, please turn Spamassassin on, leave the spambox off and set a filter to discard spam. Instructions for this filter are on the filter page.

Server Maintenance

Regarding servers with nameservers ns1.247webs.net and ns2.247webs.net only:

Engineers will be conducting preventative maintenance on one of the core edge routers on Monday September 11th starting at 4:00 am CDT. During this maintenance window, customers may notice a brief period of traffic interruption and/or peering changes on the public network while engineers reload the router to change an IOS/hardware parameter. The projected maintenance window is 1 to 5 minutes. We have allotted a maintenance window of 2 hours as backbone engineers will remain onsite after the maintenance to monitor traffic re-convergence and routing.