Clean your email. Stop spam.

InboxGuardian provides clean, spam free email to your home computer, notebook and mobile device. How do we do this? Read on...

There are three main stages to this process:

1) InboxGuardian connects to your email server and retrieves all available email.
2) InboxGuardian then matches all incoming email to whitelists, blacklists and filters (these are customizable by the user) and sorts the email accordingly. Email that matches a whitelist goes to the "Clean" folder and email that matches a blacklist goes to the "Deleted" folder. Email that doesn't match stays in the "Inbox" folder for further decision.
3) When you open your email application, it connects to InboxGuardian and retrieves the email in its Clean folder.

How does InboxGuardian know which mail server I use?

These details are entered when you first start using InboxGuardian. Multiple accounts can be set up depending on your needs.

How does InboxGuardian clean my mail?

There are a couple of ways in which we do this.

1) InboxGuardian comes with 5 pre-set default filters. Three of these are language filters, which automatically delete any email(s) that contain characters from these languages (can be modified at any time). The fourth is a DNS blacklist filter. If any email matches a DNS blacklist entry then it is also removed. The fifth is the InboxGuardian Spam Words filter; similar to a DNS Blacklist filter it matches email subjects against common spam words, such as "Cialis" and "Viagra" etc.

2) User defined white/black list and filters. You have complete control over which email address you add to the white and black list. Simply any email that matches a white list will be moved to the outbox ready for retrieval and any email that matches a black list will be deleted. Filters can also be used to catch emails that match certain criteria. For example a filter can be set up to white list any email that comes from an "@visualware.com" address, or even delete any email that comes from China.

NOTE: Deleted emails are kept for a user defined number of days just in case a valid email sneaks through!

How do I get my clean mail?

When you first install InboxGuardian a wizard will take you through the set up process. The second part of that process is setting up and running the InboxGuardian mail server and web server.

The mail server is the feature that allows you to connect to InboxGuardian directly from your computer or mobile device and the web server is the feature that allows you to remotely access InboxGuardian via a browser. This is very beneficial as it allows you to view your emails from any web browser! (note if you are using InboxGuardian within an internal network then router port forwarding is needed to allow external access to the management and mail servers).

Once the mail server has been set up you have to change your email client settings to point to InboxGuardian. The example below should help explain...

Lets say you are using Outlook to access your Hotmail account. Your Hotmail settings in Outlook will have the incoming mail (POP mail) address as pop3.live.com. This tells Outlook where to go to get your Hotmail emails. Now you want to use InboxGuardian to clean your mail. All that is needed is to change the pop3.live.com entry to the IP address you chose when setting up the mail server (see example image above). In the image shown the IP address is 192.168.0.101. This will now point Outlook to InboxGuardian, rather than Hotmail directly.

What if I don't want to use the mail/web server feature and just use InboxGuardian to manually cut down my spam?

If this is the case then simply leave your email client settings pointing to your mail box, rather than pointing to InboxGuardian. Email can still be cleaned by InboxGuardian without the need to connect to it directly.