Recently we have been visited by spammers who were able to send spam through a few of our merchants email accounts. The email accounts which were compromised had easy to guess simple passwords. These attacks have affected our reputation as an email provider which in turn affects the deliverability of messages sent from our server. It is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that your email inbox’s have strong passwords to prevent these types of attacks from happening. Our staff is working hard to restore our reputation but we need help from you. Please double check all of your email inbox passwords to ensure that they are using strong passwords consisting of at least one each of the following:
- upper and lowercase letters
- number
- symbol
- at least 7 characters
The strong email passwords have been a requirement since June 25th of last year but they are only enforced automatically for users who login via webmail (to see the applicable blog entry click here). Over the next few days we will be sending support requests to stores which have email passwords that do not meet the strong password criteria and asking you to update them if applicable. Inbox’s which do not meet the password requirements will be limited to only sending a few messages per hour beginning May 1st. To change your password just login to webmail, if your password does not meet the strength requirements you will be prompted to change it.
I know, these types of updates and new requirements aren’t fun and it they take time away from your core business but security is important. Hackers and spammers are getting more sophisticated every year and we all need to stay ahead of them to ensure your business and ours runs smoothly.