Solve a spam problem from its own email address

This guide explores the concepts of e-mail address usurpation, spoofing, and spam that give the appearance of coming from your own email address.

Did my account send spam?

It is possible that you would receive spam that seems to come from your own email address. Be assured that this spam is only 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 whether your own email address is present in the white list of your spam filter If so, it is necessary to remove it from this list.

I'm getting mass mailing errors.

Spammers use various tactics to hide the true source of their messages. They often change the sender's address, either by creating it or by randomly selecting it from existing mailing lists, making it difficult to trace the actual origin of the message. Imagine that anyone can pass for you by sending a postal letter indicating your address on the back of the envelope. Similarly, spammers can pass for you using your email address as a sender, in order to bypass spam filters and reach their target audience.

When you frequently receive error messages indicating the failure of the delivery of so-called spam, it is possible that these messages were not actually sent from your account, but they simply made it appear that they came from your email address.

These messages can be sent in two ways: either from insufficiently secure messaging servers, exploited by spammers until vulnerability is detected and corrected, 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, on the simple request of a spammer, according to the principle of botnets.

Was I hacked?

This in no way means that your account has been hacked, your email address has been stolen, or your identity has been usurped. Rather, it is an attempt to circumvent anti-spam security measures, called "mail forging" or falsification of emails. This is an issue that, unfortunately, Infomaniak and other hosting companies cannot do anything about.

The only solution would be that all email servers in the world are secure and require authentication for sending emails, which Infomaniak's ethical servers do.

However, as long as all servers on the planet are not secure, "mail forging" will continue to be a persistent challenge.

Additional precautions

Check that no address Catchall-type address on your e-mail service is not redirected to the overloaded e-mail address, as this could be the cause of an increase in undelivered e-mails.

The establishment of a protocol DMARC can also help you analyze the use that is made of your email.