This guide explores the concepts of email address hijacking, spoofing, and spam that appears to come from your own email address.

Has my account sent spam?

It is possible that you receive spam that appears to come from your own email address. Rest assured that this spam is intended solely for you and will not be sent to your contacts from your address. Your email account remains secure, and its integrity is in no way compromised.

To reduce the presence of these messages in your inbox, check if your own email address is on the whitelist of your anti-spam filter. If it is, you need to remove it from this list.

I am receiving mass sending errors

Spammers use various tactics to hide the true source of their messages. They often alter the sender's address, either by creating it or by randomly selecting it from lists of existing addresses, making it difficult to trace the real origin of the message. Imagine if anyone could impersonate you by sending a postal letter with your address on the back of the envelope. Similarly, spammers can impersonate you by using your email address as the sender, aiming to bypass anti-spam filters and reach their target audience.

When you frequently receive error messages indicating the failure to deliver alleged spam, it is possible that these messages were not actually sent from your account, but merely made it seem as though they came from your email address.

These messages can be sent in two ways: either from insufficiently secured mail servers, exploited by spammers until the vulnerability is detected and fixed, or by Trojan horses infecting hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. These computers, often referred to as "zombies," send messages almost automatically, without the knowledge of their owners, at the simple request of a spammer, following the principle of botnets.

Have I been hacked?

This in no way means that your account has been hacked, that your email address has been stolen, or that your identity has been stolen. It is rather an attempt to bypass anti-spam security measures, known as "mail forging" or email falsification. This is an issue that, unfortunately, Infomaniak and other hosts cannot do anything about.

The only solution would be for all mail servers worldwide to be secured and require authentication for sending emails, which Infomaniak's ethical servers already do.

However, as long as not all servers worldwide are secured, "mail forging" will remain a persistent challenge.

Additional precautions

Check that no catch-all address on your mail service is redirected to the overloaded mail address, as this could be the cause of an increase in undelivered emails.

Implementing a DMARC protocol can also help you analyze how your email is being used.