Account Access Controls

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 Account Security features launched

We are excited to announce the launch of a new Account Security interface with Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for Runbox.

This completes more than a year of development, and we are quite proud of the result. The new features will significantly improve the security of your Runbox account when you activate them.

Account Security features

The new Account Security interface includes 4 main features: Two-Factor Authentication, Manage Services, App Passwords, and Last Logins.

Used separately or in combination, these features add extra layers of security to your Runbox account.

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is a log in procedure where an additional piece of information is required in addition to your username and account password.

This additional factor is a code that can only be used once, or for a limited period of time.

Two-Factor Authentication
Runbox Two-Factor Authentication

Runbox 2FA currently supports Timed One-Time Passwords (TOTP) and One-Time Passwords (OTP) as additional factors. We are planning to expand this with Yubikey or U2F support.

Manage Services

The new Account Security interface lets you disable various services such as IMAP, POP, and SMTP. These are the services you use when using an email app/program to access your mail.

By disabling services you are not using, you prevent attempts at unauthorized access to your account via those services.

App Passwords

You can also set up unique passwords for each of your apps or devices, giving you complete control over the access to your account.

If you then happen to lose a device you can simply delete the corresponding app password, effectively disabling access from that device.

Last Logins

This section shows a list of the most recent login attempts to your account from each service such as web, IMAP, POP, and SMTP.

If you suspect that there have been unauthorized login attempts to your account, you can review this list and take appropriate action.

How to set up Account Security features

To get started, just go to the Account Security screen to set up 2FA and the other security features.

We encourage you to review our Account Security help page for details about the new functionality first. This will ensure that you understand how 2FA works and prevent you from getting locked out of your account.

We welcome any questions or feedback you might have, either as comments to this blog post or via our contact form or support system.

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