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 seems to come from your own email address. Rest assured that this spam is only intended 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 present in the whitelist of your anti-spam filter. If it is, it is necessary to remove it from this list.

I am receiving bulk sending errors

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

When you frequently receive error messages indicating the failure to deliver alleged spams, it is possible that these messages were not actually sent from your account, but simply made to appear as if 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 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, 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 hijacked. It is rather an attempt to bypass anti-spam security measures, called "mail forging" or email falsification. This is an issue to which, unfortunately, Infomaniak and other hosts cannot do anything.

The only solution would be for all mail servers in the world to be secured and require authentication to send emails, which Infomaniak's ethical servers do.

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

Additional precautions

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

Implementing a DMARC protocol can also help you analyze the use of your mail.