Vulnerabilities in PGP and S/MIME

May 23, 2018 2 Comments

We have been following a story that appeared recently about vulnerabilities in PGP and S/MIME that can cause a leak of the plaintext content of encrypted emails.

A technical description of the vulnerabilities can be found at https://efail.de/

There are a number of possible mitigations for the vulnerabilities, and they vary in how much they might impact your use of encryption. As we have help pages about how to use encryption with email, we felt we should let you know about these particular vulnerabilities.

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Account Access Controls

December 13, 2017 Leave a comment

It’s been a few months now since we launched the new authentication service that made Runbox Two-Factor Authentication possible.

Watching over your account

Behind the scenes the authentication service has been working to protect your account from unauthorised access. One of the ways it does this is by analysing the pattern of successful and failed logins for your account.

Using a set of rules it determines if a particular IP address should be allowed to access the service or whether it should be blocked from further attempts. It also determines which IP addresses should be treated with less caution as they are your legitimate IP address.

Obviously we can’t say too much about the rules used as this could compromise the effectiveness of this system, and we are always improving the rule set to take in to account new scenarios that we encounter

Giving you more information

The design of the authentication service allows us to share with you the IPs that try to access your account, and whether that access was successful or not. This can help you in troubleshooting problems you may encounter when setting up devices with your Runbox account, but it can also alert you to attempts at unauthorised access.

You can find this information on the “Access Control” tab at Account > Account Security.

Blocked IP addresses

We have also implemented new features on the “Access Control” page that show you the IPs that are blocked for your account. You can then decide if they should be permanently blocked or removed from the blocked list.

Giving you more control

In addition you can now also block IPs yourself or add allowed IPs that should always have access to your account when the correct username, password (and 2FA where applicable) credentials are supplied. This is done via the “Manage IPs” section.

 

A list of IP addresses you have allowed and denied yourself is visible at the bottom of the page in the Access Control List, and from there you can mange this IP addresses.

It’s also possible for Main account holders to set up rules for the Sub-account accounts they have control of.

We hope you find these new features useful, and if you need any help with them please see our help page about Access Control.

 

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New Spam Filtering

August 16, 2016 7 Comments

Recently we have been testing a new component to our spam filtering system. This component is powered by Cloudmark, one of the most popular and powerful spam filter systems available. We would now like to make Cloudmark available to more customers.

How Cloudmark works

Cloudmark is designed to detect known spam better and works as a central authority based on reporting by millions of Cloudmark users. It would help us improve our implementation of Cloudmark to have more Runbox users testing it.

Customers who are testing Cloudmark don’t need to do anything different in the way they use their email. However, we ask testers to report spam (or genuine mail) that is not classified correctly to a special Runbox email address.

No data is shared with a third party when using Cloudmark, as it’s running on Runbox’ own servers. Any reporting done by our customers is currently only going to Runbox itself. When we implement a reporting facility back to Cloudmark in the future it will be implemented as a clearly marked option.

How to start using Cloudmark

If you are interested in having Cloudmark added to your account, or wish to ask questions about it, please let us know at Runbox Support (support@nullrunbox.com).

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Launch of CalDAV calendar service

July 26, 2016 21 Comments

Today we officially launch our CalDAV calendar service. With CalDAV you can store your calendars on Runbox’ servers using calendar apps on your computer, smart phone or tablet.

CalDAV lets you store your calendar items online and synchronize them across multiple devices. You can create events, recurring events, alarms and also invite other people to add events to their own calendars. Additionally you can create reminders/to-do lists and use those in your favorite notes app.

How to set up CalDAV

To use CalDAV you will need these details:

  • Username: Enter your Runbox username. If you use your own domain name, the username format is you@nulldomainyouown.tld.
  • Password: Enter your Runbox password.
  • Server Address: Enter https://dav.runbox.com/

For details on how to set up your CalDAV program or app, please see the CalDAV help page. And if you have any questions about this service, please contact Runbox Support.

Runbox CalDAV is the first of a new collection of services that will also include CardDAV (contacts) and WebDAV (file storage), so look out for more news in the weeks and months ahead.

 

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Support Requests & Account Security

May 16, 2016 Leave a comment

At Runbox we are very pleased to be able to offer personalized support to our customers, and we do this 7 days/week, every week of the year.

If you need to contact Runbox Support, we would advise you to read our help page on Contacting Runbox Support. In particular we would like to draw your attention to the sections regarding how we will use information to identify you as the account holder.

It is very important that we protect your privacy and security of your account, and there are elements of that process that require you to keep account information up to date so that we can ensure we are talking to the correct person.

The most commonly used piece of information we use to identify you when you can’t contact us from your Runbox account is your alternative email address, and it is very important that you keep this up to date. Being unable to verify you as the account holder is very frustrating for customers and also for us as we can’t offer you the support you are expecting.

We realize there are some customers who prefer their Runbox account not be linked to other email accounts or methods of communication, but this does limit the support we can offer in those cases. We will always try to help as best we can, but ultimately we would rather deny access to an account than to provide that access to the wrong person.

If you have any questions about this, please contact Runbox Support  🙂

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New IMAP Service Migration

November 27, 2015 1 Comment

There are two main ways that people access their Runbox email. The first is our webmail service available on our website, and the other is via some kind of email program that might be on a computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet. If you use an email program, you will be using either our IMAP or POP service to download your incoming mail. IMAP and POP are ways in which email programs communicate with our servers to collect your mail.

We officially launched our new Dovecot IMAP service on mail.runbox.com in August, and we have been pleased with the number of customers who are moving across to this better IMAP service.

However, feedback we’ve received shows that some customers would like more time to make the switch. Therefore we are going to keep the old Courier-based IMAP service running for the time being, and will decide upon on a new retirement date in the future.

Why should I switch to the new IMAP service?

The new IMAP service provides a faster and more reliable way of accessing your mail, and also fixes a number of issues that were reported with some email apps when using the old service.

Because we need to focus increasingly on the new service, starting in January 2016 we will recommend you switch to the new service instead of providing technical support for the old IMAP service. We will of course help you switch to the new service whenever you choose to do so.

NOTE: If you are using POP you don’t need to do anything. If you’re not sure whether you’re using IMAP or POP, please contact Runbox Support.

How do I make the switch?

Setting up your account as a fresh set up usually works best, but if you just wish to change your settings without setting up your account from the start, then we have instructions for our recommended email clients that show you how to do this.

The documentation for our recommended email programs was updated a while ago to show the new server details. If you are using IMAP and keep all of your mail on our servers, you can set up your account again from the start using the details in those instructions.

If you have any questions regarding switching to the new IMAP service, please contact Runbox Support.

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DDoS Attacks – Summary of Events

November 10, 2015 16 Comments

Between November 4-6, Runbox experienced powerful DDoS attacks by a group calling themselves “Armada Collective”. Other security oriented email services such as ProtonMail, Hushmail, and Neomailbox were also attacked, as recently reported by Forbes.

The initial threats and attacks that attempted to extort money were withdrawn by the attackers on Saturday morning, when they offered an apology.

During the attacks we were focused on coordinating with our partners, putting in place countermeasures, and providing our customers with necessary information. Since the situation was unclear and evolved quickly, we decided to not publish any details that could inform the attackers in any way.

The situation is now under control and we are publishing this summary of the events as it may help shed light on what transpired against both Runbox and the other services that were attacked.

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DDoS Attacks on Runbox

November 5, 2015 11 Comments

Yesterday and today Runbox was subject to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This was initiated by a group that have threatened that if Runbox does not pay them a large amount of money, further attacks will take place in the coming days.

We were able to successfully mitigate against the effects of both incidents. During the initial attack we were down for around 15 minutes before we could put a solution in place. Today our customers should not have noticed any effects of the attack.

We think the attacks might be scaled up in the coming days.

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SPF Record Change

October 1, 2015 8 Comments

After careful consideration we have decided to adopt a stricter policy with regards to SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for our own Runbox domains.

Note: This does not affect domains owned by our customers.

What are SPF records?

SPF records are used as a way to determine if email addresses are being spoofed in sent mail. They allow domain administrators (Runbox in this case) to specify which servers are allowed to send email for the domains they control.

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