Entrap - Inbound SPAM Protection Gateway

Entrap is an advanced inbound email security gateway designed to protect your domains from spam, phishing attempts, malware, and unwanted mail. Positioned between external email senders and your destination mail server, Entrap analyzes incoming messages before delivering safe emails directly to your mailbox.

What Entrap Is (and Is Not)

Entrap operates exclusively as an inbound email filtering service. It sits in front of your host's mail system (such as cPanel) to evaluate and route incoming traffic.

How Email Flow Works

Once Entrap is configured for your domain, all incoming mail follows a structured path:

1. Sender transmits email: An external email server looks up your domain's MX records and sends the message to Entrap.

2. Gateway inspection: Entrap checks the email against IP reputation databases, custom allow/block lists, and anti-spam scoring engines.

3. Action evaluation: Based on your domain's policy settings, Entrap determines the appropriate action: Deliver: Clean mail is instantly passed to your mail server. Tag: Borderline mail is marked in the subject line or header and delivered to your inbox (or Spam folder). Hold (Quarantine): Suspicious mail is safely stored in quarantine for up to 7 days for manual review. Reject: Known harmful or blacklisted mail is refused at the gateway level.

Spam Actions and Policy Tiers

Entrap uses customizable score thresholds to categorize incoming messages. Below is an overview of how different message outcomes are handled:

Note: If you disable a specific action tier in your control panel settings, messages that meet that criteria will automatically fall through to the next lowest enabled action tier.

Setting Up Entrap MX Records

To route your incoming mail through Entrap, your domain's Mail Exchanger (MX) records must point to our filtering gateway nodes.

Required MX Records

DNS Configuration Options

• Managed DNS: If your domain uses our managed nameservers, MX records can automatically be configured when enabling protection in cPanel.

• External / Manual DNS: If your DNS is hosted with an external provider (such as Cloudflare or your domain registrar), you must log into your DNS provider's dashboard and update your MX records manually to point to the targets listed above.

Important: Filtering will only take effect once your domain's public MX records are pointing to Entrap and DNS propagation completes.

Managing Entrap via cPanel

You can manage protection rules, review quarantine, and monitor mail logs directly from your hosting control panel.

1. Locating the Entrap Feature

Log into cPanel and navigate to Email > Entrap Email Security.

2. Dashboard Overview

When you open the interface, the dashboard displays your domain's protection status, current MX record status, and a summary of recent mail traffic activity.

3. Enabling Protection

If your domain is not currently protected, click the enable switch on the dashboard page.

If you manage your DNS elsewhere, copy the three gateway addresses provided on screen and apply them to your external DNS zone.

4. Customising Protection & Spam Policy

Under policy management, you can adjust score thresholds and toggle specific actions (Tag, Hold, Reject) on or off according to your preference.

5. Managing Allow and Block Lists

You can bypass standard filtering checks by defining explicit rules for specific email addresses or entire domains:

• Allowlist: Ensures trusted senders or partner domains bypass spam checks and deliver reliably.

• Blocklist: Completely blocks nuisance senders or malicious domains at the gateway level.

6. Monitoring Activity & Search History

The activity log displays a unified timeline of recent incoming messages. You can filter logs by sender, recipient, subject, or delivery status (Delivered, Tagged, Held, or Rejected).

7. Managing Quarantined (Held) Mail

Messages classified as medium-to-high spam risk are placed in quarantine. From this screen, you can inspect details, download raw headers, delete spam permanently, or Release messages to deliver them directly to your inbox.

Note on Releasing Mail: Releasing a quarantined email delivers the original message straight to your backend inbox without re-scanning it.

8. Advanced Backend Routing Settings

The Routing tab specifies the host server address, port, and TLS options used by Entrap to hand off clean mail to your backend hosting server. These settings are pre-configured automatically and should generally not be modified unless instructed by support.

Data Retention Schedule

To respect privacy and storage constraints, Entrap limits how long email data is retained on the platform:

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Expected email is missing from my inbox

1. Verify that your domain's public MX records point correctly to Entrap.

2. Log into cPanel > Entrap Email Security and check the Activity log.

3. If the status shows as Held, click on the message and select Release. Add the sender to your Allowlist to prevent future occurrences.

4. If the log indicates the email was Delivered, check your email client's local Junk/Spam folder, user-level email filters, or hosting server disk quotas.

Protection is enabled in cPanel, but emails are not being filtered

Enabling protection in the control panel toggles the feature within our gateway system, but email will not pass through Entrap until your domain's public MX records are updated to point to entrap-01.hostns.io, entrap-02.hostns.io, and entrap-03.hostns.io.

A released email did not appear in the inbox

When you release an email from quarantine, Entrap forwards the raw message to your destination server. If it does not arrive, verify that your backend mailbox is active, not over quota, and that local email routing options in cPanel are configured properly.

Can deleted or expired quarantined emails be restored?

No. Once a message body exceeds the 7-day quarantine retention window or is manually deleted, it is permanently removed from the gateway and cannot be recovered.

Glossary