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Protecting Your Email Accounts

Posted by sbh-admin on 19 08 2017.

We’ve recently had an increase in the number of compromised customer email accounts, unfortunately this is due to some customers setting weak passwords that have been cracked by hackers and automated services that crack your email password and then use your email account to send spam. This is clearly a problem for both you and us as our servers can then be left with poor reputations resulting in your genuine emails being blocked by other email hosting providers such as Google, Office 365, and other hosting companies.

As a result of this, we’ve implemented a two-step programme in an attempt to reduce outgoing spam and protect your email accounts.

1) Outgoing Spam Filtering

We’ve decided to start using similar spam filtering techniques that we use to prevent spam emails getting into your inbox to prevent emails getting out too. This may result in some genuine emails being unable to send so if you have any problems please let us know so we can tweak the settings. At the present time, this is only available for Windows/WSP email hosting. CPanel users are still protected by the second step below.

2) Brute Force Protections

The second method we’re using to protect your accounts is brute-force blocking (when hackers try multiple passwords until they can break their way in). We’ve been using this on CPanel and DirectAdmin based hosting for quite some time now to great effect. There is a chance that your own IP address will be blocked if you happen to enter the password too many times, or if your hosting has been suspended and your email client is still trying to connect. If that does happen, please let us know via the Client Management System and we’ll get your IP address unblocked so you can carry on as usual.

We hope these changes will reduce the number of spam emails being sent from our servers via compromised accounts, but it’s crucial that as users you ensure your email accounts are protected by strong passwords. You can read more about strong passwords and other important security tips by reading our blog post from last month:

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