Advisories

Fake Mailbox Full Messages

Emails like this are usually fake. Do not follow the link. Their goal is to steal your login info and abuse your account, sending out spam or viruses to others. Even worse, they will read any/all of your email messages stored in your online mailbox. Just imagine the juicy tidbits they'll find in your emails. It could be confidential information they can abuse outright or enough clues to help them perpetrate a social engineering scam on you or others and/or commit identity theft or fraud.

There are often several warning signs in these emails to tip you off that they may not be legitimate:

• Grammatical or spelling errors.
• Signed as coming from some anonymous or generic source like "Your mail administrator" or "Support Team". *If* a legitimate email service or hosting account provider were to send such a message, they would properly identify themselves. You should know that it's not common industry practice these days to send these messages because of the scams. Unfortunately, if you don't check into your control panel and keep an eye on any provided tools that tell you mailbox size, the only way you're going to find out will be someone telling you your email is bouncing.
• Lack of identifying information about YOU as well. Paid providers especially, will normally reach out to the person who pays the bill or is otherwise the "administrator" of the account and address them by name which they have on file. They don't usually directly contact any end-users. i.e. If you have a hosting account with us for your business, we will contact YOU if there were any issues with mailboxes attached to your account. We will not be contacting individual employees who may use those email addresses directly. And we certainly wouldn't be addressing you as "Dear Amazonacct," ( because the email address is amazonacct@yourcompany.tld )
• Inviting you to follow a link or hit a button. If a legit provider sent you a message, they would only be inviting you to log in on your own accord rather than provide a link. You should already know how to reach your email control center, or if not, you can reach out to your provider by a known method.
• Hovering over those links or buttons will display an unrelated website you do not recognize.
• Images or fineprint may mismatch the company they're pretending to be. You may receive one of these for your Yahoo email address but it says it's from Google!?!

It's 06:54 AM EST on 21-Dec-2024
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