What is Integration?

Integration is the process of instructing your email application (such as Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird etc) to receive its email directly from InboxGuardian, rather than the mail box.

Think of it as the postal service, people around the world send mail and the postal service sort through everything and deliver the mail that is meant for you to your door. InboxGuardian is the postal service in this scenario.

View tutorials on integration

 

How it works WITHOUT InboxGuardian....

Both valid email and spam email come from all over the world and get sent to your mail box. When you log on to your computer and start your email application you then connect to your mail box and receive any email that is available. This often includes a lot of spam email which takes time to sort through on a daily basis.

The image below shows this process graphically:

 

How it works WITH InboxGuardian....

Both valid email and spam email come from all over the world and get sent to your mail box. When you start your computer InboxGuardian (if instructed) will start automatically and start receiving all available email from your mail box and begin sorting out the spam email and valid email*. When you start your email application it will connect to InboxGuaridan and receive only clean spam free email.

The image below shows this process graphically:

*If you're newly installing InboxGuaridan then there will be no whitelists etc set up. The more whitelists and filters that are set up the more efficient InboxGuaridan becomes.

 

So how exactly does InboxGuaridan sort my email?

Ok, as email comes into InboxGuardian from your mail box it gets sorted into three tabs, Unsure, Clean and Spam. Note that the Unsure tab may need to be enabled, this can be done in Mail box settings in the preferences tab.

Simply if an email matches a whitelist then it gets moved to the Clean tab, if it matches a blacklist it gets moved to the Spam tab and if it matches neither then it stays in the Unsure tab.

The key thing to remember is when your email application contacts InboxGuardian for email it ONLY receives email from the Clean tab. This ensures that only valid email ever makes it to your inbox.

The image below shows an example. In this scenario you would only receive 7 emails.

 

What happens to the emails left in the Unsure and Spam tabs?

The email in the Spam tab is controlled by the "Keep spam email for X hours" setting found in Mail Box settings in the preferences tab. If this option is unchecked then Spam email will automatically get deleted. We recommend keeping Spam email for at least a few hours in case something is accidently deleted.

The Unsure tab will hold email indefinitely. We recommend checking the Unsure tab once or twice a day to check for valid email and if needed delete the rest. This is easily done by right clicking any email in the Unsure tab and clicking Permenantly Delete All, the same applies to the Spam tab.

 

I don't have time to keep checking the Unsure tab for valid email, do I have any other options?

Sure, simply go to Mail Box Options and uncheck the Show Unsure Tab option. This will put all Unsure emails into the Clean tab and they will therefore make it to your inbox when your email application connects to get its email.

Your spam email will still be greatly reduced but a few may get through.

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