A few weeks ago, I started to receive email containing error messages about the delivery of some mails I didn’t send. The contents of such emails looked like spam, but why weren’t they detected by the anti-spam functionality of GMail? Maybe spammers found a new way to send their junk that circumvents current filters. But few weeks later, the annoyance persisted. I was receiving at least one of these emails per day, sometimes several per day. I started to suspect some people hacked into my GMail account and were using it to send spam, but I couldn’t find any trace of these in my « Sent » folder. Maybe they can circumvent it as well. Will I have to change my password just in case? And what would tell me they wouldn’t hack again?
Friday, April 14th, I got fed up of this. First, do these come from the same sender or group of senders? If it does, I could block these addresses. Otherwise, there is a problem with GMail that would need to be solved eventually, otherwise I would have to switch from GMail to some other email service. Looking at the sender’s address, I found out the message was coming from something @ericbuist.com. Could it be because my mail account from my Web host was misconfigured?
I logged onto my HostPapa cPanel and reached the mail options. I found out that anything @ericbuist.com not corresponding to a valid email account is sent to a default email address. As a result, spammers in need of a fake origin email address can take anything @ericbuist.com in the hope this won’t correspond to a valid address. I thus reconfigured the default route to return an error email instead of redirecting the message. I also found out that besides redirecting traffic to my GMail account, the HostPapa mail service is keeping a copy of the messages. I thus had 250Mb of junk emails there that I deleted to free space. Although the disk space is unlimited on my HostPapa, if every customer abuses it by leaving junk on their account, HostPapa will have to impose quotas at some point.
I didn’t receive other emails about mail delivery failures after that. Unfortunately, this is not the only cause of such problems. Other people had issues with that because they forwarded all their GMail emails to a service sending SMS, and the service went down. They had to disable that forwarding from their GMail accounts. Things get worse when other email addresses are redirected to a central email account. All these can be the cause of spurious emails and thus need to be checked in case of issues.