With information being so accessible on the internet, it is important that you take appropriate security measures to protect yourself against hackers and spammers. One of the areas that hackers and spammers can target is through your email service. If multiple, repeat complaints from recipients are sent and/or there is high volume outbound spam coming from your email address, our mail service will suspend the “send” function as a temporary protection measure.
Why does this happen?
As the spam may have been sent from your mailbox as authenticated, there are two things that could have happened:
- Your mailbox credentials may have become compromised due to using a public network to access mail or other means.
- Your computer may have been infected by a Trojan or was acting as part of a botnet.
General Security Tips and your Computer
1. Understanding Feedback Loops and how to make use of them
A feedback loop (or FBL) is also sometimes called a complaint feedback loop and it is an inter-organizational form of feedback by which a mailbox provider (like OpenSRS) forwards the complaints originating from their users to the sender's organizations.
When a recipient decides to click "Report as Spam" on your email, it is considered a complaint. Some mailbox providers allow visibility for when this happens by allowing the sender to sign up for a feedback loop. Feedback loops simply allow senders to receive messages back from recipients who have complained. The mailbox provider then forwards the message complained about back to the sender at a designated email address that has been set up. This is done primarily so that the sender can then suppress or remove the complaining user from their database.
Feedback loops are used primarily as a way for reporting spam. They also serve as an agreement between you and your mail provider, where they provide you with the identity of any complainers in their webmail. On your side, you need to commit to removing the reporting user from your contact list. From a business point of view, this is very valuable information to have, as this will allow you to stop sending emails to unhappy subscribers and it will also drastically lower your complaint rate, which, at the end of the day, helps your overall deliverability.
To see a diagram that illustrates how the feedback loop works, please click here.
Most mail providers and ISPs offer feedback loops to qualified senders, so the senders can identify both customers who no longer want to receive similar emails, as well as any problems originating from their networks, such as virus-infected spam-producing machines.
Should you wish to complete and submit the OpenSRS Feedback Loop Request Form, you can find it here: OpenSRS Feedback Loop Request Form.
Going forward, we strongly recommend that you remove unhappy subscribers from your mailing lists to prevent any future complaints.
2. Please only email people who have agreed to receive correspondence from you. If you send out automated emails, ensure that they have a link to click on where people can opt out of correspondence with you. Alternatively, you can add the 'opt-out' to your mail signature.
3. Regularly run antivirus software, including a malware scan on all devices used to access the mailbox.
4. Reset the password of your email address and your Yola account. You can reset your Yola account password to something nobody else knows by clicking on the following link: Reset Your Password. Information on the new password will be sent to your login email address.
5. After running a virus check, including a malware scan to ensure that your computer is cleaned and you have received confirmation that it is cleaned, please change the password on the Yola mailbox account as described here:
- Log in to My Yola.
- Click on "Email".
- If your details are not open for your mailbox, click on the mailbox link "mailbox@mydomain.com" to open the settings.
- Select "Change mailbox password for 'mailbox''" to open the change password settings.
- Enter the new password that you would like to change to in the "Password" field, and confirm this in the " Confirm password" field.
- Click "Change password".
6. Sign out after your last Yola session and do not have the 'remember me' feature activated. Log out of your computer between sessions.
By putting into practice the above tips, these will help in proactively safeguarding your Yola Mail against future hackers and spammers.