Email Problem

[clbama]

I have a small hosting plan that I've had for awhile and have a few email addresses that are associated with it that I use. When checking my mail this morning I seen that 2,500+ were waiting to download when checking my mail with Outlook. I may get 80-100 emails at one time but never in the thousands. Then when they started coming in it was alot of spam returned and mailer-daemon failure notices.

It looks as if someone has got access to my email accounts and is using them to send spam. I at most send 5-6 emails per month. The question is what do I do about it, just change my password? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[TCH-Bruce]

Best thing you can do is change your email address.

 

Second in cPanel make sure you have your default :fail:

[OJB]

It always best to be safe and change your login details, but it is more than likely that your account HASN'T been compromised but rather your email address has been spoofed. Meaning someone has sent mail 'claiming' to be from you, but really it is originating somewhere else.

 

There quite frankly is nothing you can do about this, except make sure your email address isn't written in plain text on any websites. If you have to display your email address on a site then either: 1) encode your email address by using something like this: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html and then put the encoded value on your site or 2) use an image

 

Spam bots will read email addresses off websites and then send spam 'from them'

[TCH-Alex]

This should be common spam or virus produced emails that are spoofing your address. E-mail spoofing is the forgery of an e-mail header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source. Distributors of spam often use spoofing in an attempt to get recipients to open, and possibly even respond to, their solicitations. There is not a lot that can be done as it is simple for someone to put your address in the From or Reply To fields.

 

As Bruce said, set the catchall account to :fail: so that you can cut down on the number bounce mails that you receive and keep them from filling up your inbox.

 

If you need to confirm if these are the result of spoofed mail, just post a ticket to the help desk with the full headers of any recent bounced mail.