Spam in Reverse: When Your Email Client Gets It Wrong

October 29, 2024 Leave a comment

Spam these days is no joke. Keeping our inboxes tidy can feel like a full-time job, and just when you think you’ve got it under control, an unexpected twist occurs: legitimate emails end up in your Junk folder. Yes, we’re talking about the moment when you realize important messages are hiding away in spam purgatory, thanks to email clients like Apple Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird.

Last week we wrote about a dual spam filter approach using email clients and how to set this up. We also talk about how spam has increased dramatically lately, and the reasons why. Here we look at how legitimate emails can end up in the Junk folder

The Frustration of Missing Emails

We’ve all been there. You’re expecting an important email, maybe a project update or a message from a friend, and it never arrives. You check your inbox—nothing. You start to wonder if they even sent it. Then, on a whim, you dive into your Junk folder, and there they are. Emails you thought were lost, marked as spam by your email client.

But it gets even more frustrating. Sometimes you have already filtered these emails specifically. You added them on your allowlist (what we used to call whitelist) in your Runbox Webmail, meaning you’ve already done the work to ensure they reach your inbox. So, why does your email client override your careful training and send them to Junk anyway?

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Managing Unwanted Email: A Dual Filter Approach Using Email Clients

October 25, 2024 Leave a comment

Many of us continue to face a frustrating challenge: an overwhelming influx of spam emails. This is when spam is more than just a nuisance – it becomes a real problem. Why are some inboxes inundated with spam? We look at why it’s happening and what you can do about it.

The Connection Between Data Breaches and Spam

Data breaches are alarmingly common, and stolen email addresses can be easily sold on the dark web. People who receive a lot of spam have often had their email addresses exposed on the dark web. There is a direct connection between data exposure and the amount of spam in our inbox.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

AI is significantly contributing to the rise of spam emails by enabling spammers to automate content generation, craft personalized messages, and conduct targeted campaigns at an unprecedented scale. With advanced natural language processing, spammers can create convincing emails that evade traditional spam filters, while machine learning allows them to analyze data and segment audiences effectively. 

The Reality of Online Sign-Ups

Every time you sign up for a service, your email address enters a database, and depending on the company’s privacy practices, that information can be at risk. It’s essential to approach online sign-ups with caution – consider using disposable email addresses for non-essential services and researching a company’s privacy policy. Being aware of the implications of online sign-ups is crucial for protecting your personal information.

Have I Been Pwned: A Crucial Resource

A valuable tools available is https://haveibeenpwned.com, a legitimate website where you can check if your email addresses have been compromised in known data breaches. By simply entering your email address, you can see if it has appeared in any breaches, along with details about the specific incidents.

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Plus-addressing lets you create an alias on the fly

September 5, 2024 Leave a comment

Email aliases are great – they help organize emails, reduce spam and protect our identity. But sometimes we need a quick way to create an alias without having to log in to our account to set it up. That’s when we can use plus-addressing, or subaddressing.

You simply add a + to your email address followed by a tag.

For example, if your email address is bob@nullrunbox.com, you can create a tag bob+shopping@nullrunbox.com, or bob+news@nullrunbox.com. You can use any tag, and make up as many as you like. 

Any email sent to a plus-address is delivered to your account as usual. The message is still addressed to the plus-address, and you can use this in various ways to manage your email.

Plus-addressing benefits

  • Make up addresses on the fly without having to set anything up in your Runbox account.
  • Works with any email address, alias or domain.
  • Use a plus-address to identify sites where you used your email address.
  • Plus-addresses can help hide your main email address. 
  • Use a different tag for each site so that if one has a data leak you know which one it is.
  • Filter email to specific folders based on the plus-addressing.
  • Create a filter to delete email to that particular plus address if it starts receiving spam.

Plus-addressing and email aliases are great tools to manage your email. With a Runbox account you get unlimited plus-addressing and 100 email aliases. If you have your own domain name, you get unlimited aliases. Check out this post for more info about aliases.

You can get more details about plus-addressing here.

To learn about how to create email aliases, check out this blog post.

If you need help, contact Runbox Support.

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Using Email Aliases to Combat Spam and Protect Your Identity

August 29, 2024 Leave a comment

Do you use email aliases? Aliases are a great tool that can help protect your identity, reduce spam, and organize your inbox. 

Aliases are alternative email addresses that you can use to separate emails. Instead of using the same address for everything, you set up different aliases for online subscriptions, registrations, newsletters, social media, business contacts and so on. Any category that works for you. You can use your main address for friends and family, or create another alias. 

All your aliases are set up under your main email account, and is delivered to your primary inbox. You can even set up filters so that mail is separated into specific folders in your account. 

Not only will aliases give you another layer of anonymity, it also gives you control over your information and makes online tracking more difficult. Having aliases can help prevent someone hacking your main email account, and helps protect you from phishing attacks. If one of your aliases starts to receive lots of spam, you can easily delete the alias and set up a new one.

Benefits of using email aliases

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Privacy Matters – How Our Personal Data Is Used

August 17, 2024 1 Comment

When we go online or use apps, we are being tracked. Companies collect our personal data by tracking us across the web sites we visit. They build profiles on us based on our browsing history and online behavior. They want to sell us their products and services, and the more they know about us the better they can use this data to manipulate our behavior. 

You know those ads that pop up everywhere after you looked up something? After you’ve looked up a new car, car ads follow you around all day. You research a vacation to Alaska, and travel ads show up everywhere. This is the result of targeted advertising, which is based on data they collected on you. Some call it surveillance capitalism, and it’s big business. 

Privacy is about how your data is collected, processed, stored and used. It’s about maintaining control over your personal information and your identity. Privacy isn’t about hiding secrets, it’s about keeping your personal information safe from people who can do harm.
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Why am I getting so many spam emails?

July 15, 2024 Leave a comment

You may have noticed that you’re getting a lot more spam email lately, which is frustrating and annoying. You diligently go through these emails and add them to your Spam filter, you block the sender, unsubscribe from mailing lists and so on. The spam emails keep coming…

Why it’s happening

  1. When we sign up for web sites we effectively give them permission to use our email. These companies may sell your email address to other companies who will in turn send you spam.
  2. Whenever there is a data breach on a website where you have subscribed to something, email addresses can be repeatedly sold to other spammers. You can check if your email has been been in a breach here: https://haveibeenpwned.com
  3. Spammers use mechanisms that allow their emails to go through the spam filter. They will use valid email addresses such as a @gmail account, create look-alike domains that will look like a legitimate company, or even spoof your own email address because many people whitelist their own address.
  4. Because of AI, spammers and phishers can very quickly create mass campaigns. Previously, spam was often easily spotted because of bad grammar and lack of personalization (goodbye Nigerian prince). Now, spammers use artificial intelligence to make spam and phishing more convincing, and they use social media, online behavior and public information to generate personalized campaigns. The result is that we are bombarded with spam.

What you can do

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Using Runbox aliases

September 6, 2018 9 Comments

It’s been a while since we wrote about one of the most useful Runbox features — aliases!

Aliases are a great way to organise your email, and also a very useful tool in avoiding too many problems making changes if an email address starts to receive more unsolicited or spam email than it is easy to deal with.

Aliases

Aliases are alternative email addresses for your Runbox account that deliver mail to your existing Inbox, the same Inbox your main username delivers message to. You can send and receive mail using an alias and nobody other than you need know that it is an alias. You will see aliases listed in the Compose window if you are using our webmail, and if you are using an email program you can usually set them up in the account settings.

Using your aliases

Many people use aliases to separate mail to/from different groups of people, or to separate business and personal use. You can even use filters to automatically move incoming mail addressed to aliases to specific folders in your account.

When you sign up for online accounts of different kinds (e.g. online shopping, forums, finance etc.) you could use a different alias for each account. You can use more important aliases for organisations where you feel your information is more secure, and other aliases, that you might consider throwaway addresses, for less reputable websites.

Unsolicited/spam mail

You may not be able to tell if a website is reputable or not, but if you use aliases for different kinds of use and you start getting too much unsolicited email to one or more of them, the easier option might be to decide not to use a particular alias any longer and to replace it with another one.

Abandoning an address and deleting the alias is one way to make sure it can’t receive email, but if it is your only or main email address this could mean telling friends, family, work colleagues and a whole list of websites you new address. However, if the address is an alias and you only use it for a small number of websites then it is easier to justify deleting the alias as it is less effort to set up a new alias on those websites

Setting up aliases

Runbox provides all customers with 100 aliases for their account, regardless of their plan choice. Aliases can be set up and managed by going to Account >> Aliases.

Aliases are not forwarding addresses, and forwarding can be achieved using filters. However, to allow certain combinations of Runbox accounts to work together we have made it possible for aliases to deliver messages to another Runbox account other than the account they are created on.

When you delete an alias it is permanently reserved for your account, and you can always add it back to the account that it was originally set up on. That way, you can temporarily disable an alias by deleting it, and then reinstate it at a later time.

Aliases and sub-addressing

There is another way you can create additional addresses on your account, and we will be looking at that in our next blog post about sub-addressing.

If you have any questions about using aliases, please see our help page about Aliases and Profiles.

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How To Use Email Like a Pro 3: Use Several Addresses

May 18, 2013 Leave a comment

Using just one email address can make your email communication disorganized because everything ends up in the same folder by default. It can also make you more vulnerable to spam — if your one address is picked up by so-called spambots there isn’t much you can do about it.

Having more than one email address provides great flexibility because you can associate them with the various aspects of your life such as work, school, personal, shopping, etc.

Not only will your email be much easier to organize, but you can use one of the alternative addresses for various online services — some of which might share your address with third parties with or without your consent, thereby attracting spam to your account.

Email Aliases

With Runbox you can easily set up multiple email aliases that point to your account. An email alias is simply an alternative to your main email address, and email sent to it will arrive in your account just as if it had been sent to your main address.

You can associate aliases with different email folders in your account by using filters to sort incoming email based on the recipient (alias) address.

This way you can manage several identities or profiles and gain more control over your email. Find out more about aliases or go straight to Account: Aliases in the main menu in your Runbox account to get started.

Disposable Email Addresses


Runbox even lets you use disposable addresses by adding + and a string of letters and numbers between your username and the @ sign. For instance, if your username is zorro, you can already receive email sent to zorro+whatever@nullrunbox.com.

This means that you can enter for instance zorro+idontwantspam@nullrunbox.com as your email address in a contact form at some online service, and your account will receive email sent to that address just as if it had been sent to your regular address.

Filtering Your Email

You can now filter messages sent to your alias or disposable address to a separate folder, thereby protecting your more important addresses and keeping spam away from your Inbox.

For even more fine-grained filtering, you can include the name of the service you’re leaving your dispaosable email address with, and filter email from each service to separate folders.

To find out more about email filters, see the Filter help page.

Using Catch All for unlimited aliases on your own domain.

If you own your own domain, it is possible to use the “catch all” function in Runbox Mail Manager as a way to have unlimited email aliases on that domain. You can even use filters to forward emails to other accounts within Runbox, or to other email providers.

To activate this feature go to Account > Email Hosting and select the catch all check box next to the domains you want activate catch all for, and then click “Save Settings”.

All emails addressed to anything@nulldomainyouown.com will be delivered to your account.

N.B.: Using the catch all function can attract more spam, but it is possible to control this (see below).

We will soon write another blog post about using catch all alongside filters to provide aliases for various uses, and how to control spam that using the catch all function might attract.

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How To Use Email Like a Pro 2: Use a Smartphone

April 8, 2013 Leave a comment

In today’s world of constant communication, being able to pick up your email on the go lets you stay in touch with your workplace, family, and friends regardless of where you are.

Stay connected, stay efficient

Not only does this let you stay connected in case an important message is sent to you while you’re on the road, but perhaps equally important: You can spend idle time, for instance at an airport or on a train, to stay ahead of your email communication and avoid getting a backlog which you’ll have to process once you get to a computer.

Using a Smartphone with IMAP

With a Smartphone, for instance an Apple iPhone, checking your Runbox email on the go becomes a pure pleasure. If you set up your phone to use Runbox via IMAP, you will stay completely synchronized with the server and any other computers that are configured in the same way. You can find detailed instructions on how to set up Runbox on an iPhone in our Help section.

Be aware of disruptions

Since you can connect to Runbox in a multitude of ways and from virtually any location anywhere in the world, it’s important to be aware of how to manage your communication as efficiently as possible. For instance, it can be helpful to check email regularly and at certain times to avoid it disrupting work and life too much. More on this in later posts!

 

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How To Use Email Like a Pro 1: Use Webmail (and IMAP)

February 23, 2013 4 Comments

Use Webmail

With Runbox, all your email is stored securely on our servers and is accessible to you wherever you might be located, regardless of the computer or device you happen to be using.

The easiest and most direct access method is the Runbox Webmail, which immediately provides a complete overview of the folders and messages in your account.

Webmail is easily the fastest method too, because Runbox is a database accelerated system. On the servers, all the key information about each message (sender, subject, date/time, etc) is stored in a database. The Runbox Webmail just has to poll the database instead of checking the content of each message to display the message overview in a folder, which is what IMAP and POP would have to do.

Use IMAP instead of POP

If you want to download email to your computer, mobile phone, or tablet, consider using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) instead of POP. IMAP allows your email client to stay completely synchronized with all your folders on the server while also downloading messages locally.

IMAP not only synchronizes the messages themselves, but also the read/unread status and flags of each message. It will even copy messages you send from your device to the server’s Sent folder.

POP (Post Office Protocol), on the other hand, can only download from one folder (usually the Inbox) at a time, and can be set to delete the messages from the server so that they can’t be accessed from another device.

Stay synchronized with Webmail + IMAP

The combination of Webmail and IMAP is ideal if you use more than one computer or device, if you’re traveling, and if you’d like to stay connected wherever you may be.

You’ll never have to be without your email again!

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