How to debug a single mail account?

Maintenance
1

Hi there. :wave: I’m a happy user of mailinabox. And I have several email accounts on my miab.

One of my accounts gets a lot of spam, and I wonder why. Could it be that I opened some spam mail link which triggered my email to end up on some spam list? Or could it be that I have mistrained spam filtering for that one account? Do anyone have some experiences or links to guides on this?

Cheers,
Nils :smile:

2

My question is how generic of a name is the email? Because if someone knows your domain name is a mail server, I would imagine they would hit email addresses like admin@example.com, postmaster@example.com, abuse@example.com, root@example.com, etc… I believe mail-in-a-box automatically aliases these generic mail admin mailboxes to the admin accounts, so that may be a source of spam.

I would also check to see who you have given your email address to. Do you have it on a website? What have you signed up for? Who have you emailed? Another source is your domain WHOIS record. Did you use your registrar’s whois guard, or is your email address listed publicly on the whois record?

3

Thanks for the reply @Eliter.

The email does not start with a common email handle like the ones that you listed.

As for who I’ve given the email to that can be many people. But my current email has been displayed on my homepage for a number of years, is hosted on the same MiaB and receives no way nearly as much spam as this one. :thinking:

What I do remember is that I mistakenly clicked on a link in a spam email. So, that might have put that email on some automated spamming list? :man_shrugging: Or maybe that accidentally trained the anti-spam configuration for that account to allow email through?

4

Is it the MiaB system admin account? The one that you initially created when setting up your MiaB? If so, that would absolutely be a direct result of the scenario that @Eliter was discussing as those special aliases are forwarded to the box administrator.

5

Thanks for the reply. I just checked in my MiaB dashboard and the spammed email is not set as administrator email to get email forwarded to it.

6

By clicking the link, you confirmed your address as active/in use, making it more valuable when being sold as part of a list of “confirmed addresses”. Expect more spam to come :confused: