Kayako eSupport v2: Preventing Ticket Spam by adding Anti-Spam Protection with BoxTrapper Integration

Many web hosts spend at least 2% of their time removing spam tickets. That is, tickets that are created via email messages.
The problem on the side of these companies is, they must have their email addresses publicly available; and even if they choose not to, their clients’ domains’ WHOIS output will always show an email address belonging to the organization, such as dns@company.com or billing@company.com.

Since Kayako eSupport is one of the most popular HelpDesk software available for website hosting companies, I decided to use it as an example for this mini-tutorial. Of course this method can be applied to more helpdesk software, it’s just a matter of configuring things correctly and using IMAP to check for new tickets instead of using Email Piping, which unfortunately is what most webmasters tend to use. So let’s start:

The first thing you should do if you are using Email Piping is to delete your forwarders and replace them with real POP3/IMAP mailboxes.
EG: Usually webmasters only create an email forwarder piping the email to /public_html/esupport-folder/admin/pop3pipe.php

All those valiases have to be removed permanently. Then create the email addresses as POP3/IMAP mailboxes.
Once you’ve done so, log into your Kayako eSupport Administration Area as an administrator and click on “Settings”.

Then, click on the Email icon. If you already had your email addresses configured in Kayako, they should be listed on this page with “PIPE” listed as “Method”.
On every account configured, you must do the following modifications:

1. Click on the “Edit” icon just on the right side of the configuration summary (just before the Delete icon)
2. Once the full configuration page for the selected email address opens, modify the “Method” variable to “PHP IMAP Functions”.
3. Add your “Host” and email username and password. This of course must match the credentials you have selected when you created your email account. As for the email host, I strongly recommend you to use “localhost” if your mail server is being hosted on the same machine as Kayako. This will bypass the need to resolve the mail server address, significantly decreasing the server load if you have a busy helpdesk.
4. Click on “Update” and do this for all your email addresses.

Once this part is completed, we should go to cPanel (if you’re using cPanel, that is) and enable BoxTrapper for all the email addresses you are using on your Helpdesk. It’s recommended to change the verification messages as well, so they look like they are coming from a Helpdesk. An example verification message would be:

“Thank you for contacting us. Our company is now using an Anti-Spam system in order to prevent spam on our helpdesk. As such we require our users to verify that they intended to send the message. This will only be required one time. Once you verify, your email address will be added to our company’s whitelist and you will no longer have to verify on future email messages sent to us.”

Of course this is just an example, and not a very elaborated one. Use your creativity for that
Most of the users will understand this. Just make sure you emphasize that you added the spam protection in order to reduce server load and also to reduce time removing all those daily spam digests you are receiving. Also, I would add that being a company, you must of course write press releases every now and then, and when this is done your email addresses will be listed on thousands of websites, making them easy-to-pick email addresses for SpamBots. Again, use your creativity and common sense to explain this to your clients.

The next and final step is to add a Cron Job so Kayako checks your mailboxes every 5 minutes. (of course this can be adjusted to your needs - just change the cron job if needed):
*/5 * * * * /path/to/php /FULL/PATH/TO/ESUPPORT/admin/pop3functions.php 2>&1 > /dev/null

For example, if you are using cPanel, the cronjob would be something like this:
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /home/yourusername/public_html/PATH/TO/ESUPPORT/admin/pop3functions.php 2>&1 > /dev/null

Of course this depends on the system you are being hosted on, so if you’re not sure what to add there just point your system administrator to this tutorial and he’ll do it for you.

That should be all there’s to it. You should be now Spam-Protected.