Knowledgebase
I receive hundreds of bounced emails
If at any time during your stay with us or while hosted with anybody else for that matter and you start to receive hundreds of "mail delivery error" emails claiming that the email you sent could not be delivered then you may be the victim of a "Domain Spoof Attack"
READ CAREFULLY AND FAMILIARISE YOURSELF WITH CPANEL EMAIL
There are several steps you should take immediatley to minimise the the amount of emails that will flood into your inbox because you may receive several thousand emails per second and you risk having your email facilities disabled briefly.
Step 1
Log into your cpanel (domain.com/cpanel) and from the "Mail" section, go to "autoresponders" and temporarily delete all "autoresponders" because these will be sending out auto-response messages to the thousands of bounce messages, and these will also bounce, multiplying the problem every second.
Step 2
From the "Mail" section, select "default address" and set this to :FAIL: so that all incoming emails for email addresses that do not exist will automatically be discarded otherwise your mailboxes will be flooded.
We strongly advise that your default email address for all incoming email addresses is set to :FAIL: (include the colon each side of FAIL)
Step 3
Turn off your "Spam Assasin" to enable incoming mail to be processed quicker and to avoid having your spam box flooded if enabled.
Once you have done this you can only sit back and watch the remaining emails that may come pouring into your inbox if they do happen to be for an existing email account that you do have. Try to delete as many as you can in bulk batches via your web mail, or download them from the server to your own PC in big batches every few minutes.
This is another reason for avoiding generic email accounts such as "sales@" or "info@" as you will have no control over where the emails are coming from and will unfortunately be powerless to stop them.
Domain spoofing is NOT the fault of the website owner and with current technology and legislations in place it is impossible to stop it from happening and can happen to anybody at anytime and is used as another form of a "Denial of service" attack in an attempt to bring down websites or servers.
In some case's, it may be required to have your account suspended temporarily to forcefully reject all incoming email, but this depends on several things such as time of day and server impact of the mail spoofing attack.
All we can do is to try and minimise it's impact.
IF THIS HAPPENS TO YOU THEN WE INSIST YOU CALL US ASAP.
DO NOT TRY TO SEND US AN EMAIL FROM YOUR WEBSITE.
- 76 Users Found This Useful
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