How it works
One field, and nothing else changes
Humainbox sits between the form and the mailbox. Mail arrives at an address we generate, we judge whether it is a genuine enquiry, and the genuine ones go on to the people you nominated. Three moves, and only the first one is yours.
step 01
Point your form at us
Add an inbox in your panel and we generate an address for it. Open your form settings, replace the recipient address with ours, save. That is the whole installation.
It works everywhere because it relies on the one thing every form already does: it sends an email. No plugin to keep updated, no script on your pages, no build step, nothing to break when your theme changes.
Each form gets its own inbox, and each address is long and random rather than guessable. Secrecy is not the defence, though. Some builders print the recipient in the page source, so what stops anyone who learns the address is a per-inbox hourly limit and a global cap.
step 02
Every message is checked
Mail sent by a contact form all comes from the same place: your own server, your own sending domain, your own address. The sender tells us nothing, so the message itself is what gets checked.
Every decision carries its reasoning. Not a private score you are asked to accept, but the signals that fired, in plain language, with the weight each one contributed. Open any message in the panel and you see why it was treated the way it was.
When you disagree, say so. The correction is recorded against that inbox. Spam arrives as campaigns, the same text sent to thousands of forms, so the next copy of it is answered for free.
The weights above illustrate the format rather than a published rule set. Signals and weights vary by message, and are always shown as they were applied.
Reply-To resolution
Filtering is only half the job. An enquiry that survives the gate still has to reach somebody who owns it, in a form they can answer without copying an address out of the body by hand.
You reply, and the customer never gets it
Most forms send from the site's own address, and the visitor's real address ends up as a line of text in the body. Press reply and your answer goes to your own automated mailbox, where nobody reads it. The enquiry is not lost in the noise. It is lost after you decided to answer it.
What your form sends today
From: [email protected]
Reply-To: (not set)
Subject: New enquiry from the website
Name: Marta Kowalski
Email: [email protected]
Message: Could you quote for the
Hillside refurbishment?
Press reply and it goes to [email protected]. Marta hears nothing and assumes you are not interested.
What lands in your mailbox
From: Marta Kowalski (via Humainbox)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Subject: New enquiry from the website
Name: Marta Kowalski
Email: [email protected]
Message: Could you quote for the
Hillside refurbishment?
Press reply and it goes to Marta. The original message is untouched. We set the header that should have been set in the first place.
We look in the Reply-To header first, then in the body of the message, then in the From header, and every delivered message says which of the three produced the address. When none of them does, the message is marked rather than forwarded with a reply address that would fail silently.
Your settings
Two settings you choose, separately for each inbox
How much authority Humainbox has over delivery, and how suspicious it must be before it uses that authority. Set per inbox, because a careers form and a pricing form are not the same channel.
What Humainbox is allowed to do
Dry run
Everything is delivered exactly as today. We still read every message and record what we would have held. A week of evidence at no risk.
delivery: everything · scoring: on · holding: never
Live
The gate closes. Messages over the threshold are held and the rest go through, routed. Held mail stays in your account, one click from your mailbox.
delivery: the ones a person wrote · scoring: on · holding: on
Two more exist and neither is a reason to start. Mirror is dry run without an end date, for a form you want judged and recorded but never held. Sandbox forwards nothing at all, so whoever wires the form up can submit it as often as they like without landing test enquiries on your sales desk.
The second dial is how suspicious a message has to be before it is held: loose, balanced or strict. Balanced is the default and where most inboxes stay; the other two exist because a careers form and a pricing form do not pay the same price for the same mistake. Both dials are set per inbox, both are reversible, and both take effect on the next message — so you change your mind after watching a week of your own mail rather than guessing now.
step 03
Real enquiries reach the right person
A message that gets through does not go back to the shared address it came from. It goes to whoever you nominated for that inbox: a named person, or a team where everyone gets their own copy.
Recipients can be set once for the account and inherited, or overridden inbox by inbox. Adding someone takes effect on the next message, and nothing on your website has to be republished.
Held messages are not hidden either. They sit in the panel with their reasoning, and one click sends one on. Attachments stay behind, because forwarding an unverified file would make this a malware relay.
When something breaks
If we break, your mail still arrives
Putting anything in the path of your enquiries is a real decision, and the honest question is what happens on our worst day. Mail is delivered.
If scoring is unavailable, if a dependency is down, if something goes wrong we did not anticipate, the message passes through rather than being held. An outage degrades Humainbox to a plain forwarder. You get a day of noise back, and you keep every enquiry.
A deliberate asymmetry. Unread noise is an annoyance you clear in an afternoon. A lost enquiry is a customer who thinks you ignored them, and you never find out.
And when something looks odd you do not have to take our word for what arrived. Open the original message, headers and all, exactly as it reached us.
Start here
Try it for a week with nothing switched on
Put one inbox in dry run for a week. Everything still reaches you, and at the end you have a list of what would have been held and why. Then decide.