Service Status

28.08.2008 09:42:15 CET

All systems operational.

Current issues

Surge in spam

In recent weeks there has been a significant global increase in spam, typically containing meaningless blocks of text or excerpts from random literary works. Much of this spam has the name of the falsified sender in the subject line.

These messages are designed to confuse trainable spam filters such as the one utilized by Runbox. You should avoid training messages that do not have typical spam-like characteristics (ads, promotions, links, etc) as spam, because it might cause your spam filter to start misclassifying legitimate messages.

The intention of the spammers and spam robot networks (clusters of computers infected with spamming viruses) is probably to make your spam filter more vulnerable to future, more conventional spam attacks.

Runbox is working to increase spam filter performance to combat this spam surge and deploy improved spam filter options. We recently modified the system-wide spam filter configuration to include all Address Book contacts in the spam filter whitelists, so that messages from known contacts will not be classified as spam. We intend to improve this further in the coming weeks, making your spam filter work better and smarter.

If you are severely affected by spam and would like to change your username in order to reduce the problem (while keeping the your account otherwise unchanged), please email us at support@runbox.com.

This graph illustrates the severity of this surge, largely aided by so-called bot nets of zombie computers spewing out spam.

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

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.

Messages claiming to be from Runbox administrators

A recent slew of virus-generated messages claiming to be from Runbox (or the admins of whichever domain your email address is on) has caused confusion among our users. Some messages claim that your account has been or will be shut down, others that your password has been changed. Please delete any and all messages claiming to come from us, which have an attachment. Genuine runbox mails come from runbox, support or billing AT runbox.com, and have no attachments.

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.