Service Status

11.06.2009 15:00 CET

Scheduled server upgrade and service disruption

We will perform an upgrade of the main email system database server this Tuesday June 16. at approximately 10 AM CET (4 AM EST). During the upgrade, which we estimate will take around one hour, all Runbox email accounts will be inaccessible, but incoming email will be queued on our servers for subsequent delivery.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Current issues

Spam

Spam continues to be a problem affecting all email services and users, and the amount of spam being sent globally is illustrated by this graph of spam trends. Much of the spam is sent by so-called bot nets of zombie computers that have been infected by computer viruses. See our Anti-spam Info page for more information about spam and how to prevent it.

Spam from your own address

Many users have discovered spam appearing to have been sent from their own address. This does not mean that anyone is using your account without your consent -- it is simply a consequence of the way the email system was designed, which lets anyone send email "from" any address. It's comparable to putting a random return address on an envelope, as it is very difficult to verify who actually sent the email/letter.

This type of email falsification is perpetrated by spammers to make the sender address of spam to appear legitimate, and to avoid receiving the error messages that are generated by non-existent recipient addresses (spammers tend to send large amounts of messages to more or less random addresses).

Additionally, spammers exploit the fact that many email users have whitelisted their own address, which means that spam being sent "from" their own address will categorically be perceived as legitimate email by their spam filter, thus being delivered to their Inbox. We therefore recommend that you do not include your own address in the whitelist (in the Filter section) or in the Contacts section (which is automatically whitelisted).

Please see our Filter help page for more help with handling spam.

Spam bounces sent to Runbox addresses

Unknown spammers have recently been forging Runbox email addresses (randomly, although having a short or first name username increases the chances of such incidents) on their junk mail, causing many of our users to get the bounces. This is just about impossible to prevent, since spammers as a rule use servers which don't require any sort of authentication, and anyone using email can make their mails look like they come from the address of their choice. No one has actually used the forged accounts, in other words. This is an increasing problem, affecting many domains.

Validation of From addresses

We now require that you validate the address you're sending from, unless it's among your Runbox aliases.

Please log in to Webmail and enter the address you would like to send from in the Preferences for any Webmail folder. After you have clicked [Save settings], an email will be sent to that address with a link you need to click on to verify the address ownership.

Afterwards you can send email from that address via Webmail or SMTP.