The amount of spam (also known as unsolicited email) you may receive in any particular email account can vary widely from one time to another. At Runbox we often refer to spam as coming and going in “waves”.

There are things you can do to minimise the chances of receiving a lot of spam and we will mention a few later in this help page.

Spam and mailing lists

We should be clear about what spam is and what it is not. We often get reports of spam and when we look at the examples we are sent it turns out these are actually marketing emails from mailing lists that you may or may not realise you have signed up for.

Often we tell people not to use unsubscribe links in spam as they don’t work and just tell spammers that you are able to receive their spam and as such you are validating your email address on their list. However, if the unwanted email is from a mailing list you recognise (maybe an online retailer you have purchased from) then it might be worth trying to use the unsubscribe link as often these are well managed lists and you will be removed. Only do this though if you are sure about the source of the email and please don’t mark it as spam in your account. If a retailer won’t unsubscribe you from a list you can probably block them in other ways and we can help with that.

When spam becomes a problem

Ideally our spam filters would either reject spam altogether or move spam to the Spam folder in your account. However, having large amounts of spam whether they are moved to the Spam folder or remain in the Inbox can be a problem either way.

When the messages go to Spam you should still sort through them in case any legitimate messages were accidentally moved there (false positives). However, if there are a lot of messages in the Spam folder then this makes the task difficult and becomes a problem in itself. Equally lots of spam that goes to the Inbox is a problem too and could indicate that some changes in the account settings need to be made.

Things you can do to help avoid spam

  • Set up your email address with more than a few characters as the part before the @ symbol (the local part as it is known). Short addresses like mail@ or info@ are easy to guess as they are obvious, but also as they are short can  easily be “randomly guessed” in a dictionary attack. Less obvious short names might also be susceptible to this such as dave@ or mike@. We do realise you may want an easy to remember address or something more obvious, but with that you have to balance the risk that the address may attract spam.
  • Avoid using the “catch all” feature on your own domain unless you need to. This feature means every possible email to any address (even ones that don’t exist) on your domain will be delivered to your account because this is what the feature is there for. It was designed to be used to “catch” emails where the sender has mistyped the email address. This would mean suppory@runbox.com would still be delivered even though the intended address is support@runbox.com and in that sense the feature is useful. However, the catch all feature makes it easy for spammers to send email to a domain.
  • Make use of your aliases. Aliases are alternative addresses that deliver to the same account. For example, info@ and mail@ could both be delivered to the same Inbox. By using different aliases for different purposes you can make managing unwanted email easier. For example, you can use some addresses for personal emails (friends and family perhaps) where you are unlikely to get spam from, and then use other addresses for online shopping where maybe due to a data leak on a website your email address suddenly becomes available to spammers. If an address you use for online shopping starts receiving a lot of spam you can delete it and use a different one without having to inconvenience friends and family by having them need to update their contact details for you. Each Runbox account allows you to have up to 100 aliases on our Runbox domains and an unlimited number if you use your own domain. A domain is the part after the @ symbol such as @runbox.com

Reporting Spam Problems to Runbox

If spam becomes a problem with your account you can get in touch with Runbox Support and we can look in to whether there is any advice we can give you regarding your account, or filters you can put in place that might help. It might also be that if a pattern in the spam is found that we can make changes to the overall spam filtering at our end that could help.

We will ask you to send us Message Headers in an attachment to a message if you contact us about spam problems. You can find out more about this and why an attachment is needed on our dedicated help page about Message Headers.