An email account may be compromised in a number of different ways, including not having a strong password, or due to the presence of a virus or malware on your computer. If you receive notification that your email address has been flagged for abuse due to a report that it has been sending out a very high volume of email (marked as suspicious for spam), you need to immediately take the following action:
1. Reset the password using the following password requirement:
- Important: Must not be a password you've used in the past
- must have a minimum of 8 characters (alphanumeric)
- require a number in the password
- require a capital letter in the password
- require a lower case letter in the password
- require a password that does not match the username
2. Scan all computers that access this email account for viruses or malware. There are many free virus/malware software programs available online. It is mandatory to have updated virus/malware detection software installed on any computer accessing VCG's hosted mail server .
Email accounts and/or domains that have been identified as sending spam must be temporarily suspended from the mail server, as simply changing the password may not prevent rogue malware from re-accessing this information from your computer. Please note that suspending an email account does not have any impact on the ability for users to send email to this account. The email is simply held until the account owner's access to the account has been restored (following confirmation from the account owner that the above steps are, or will be, taken care.
Should this happen to you, we apologize for any inconvenience, and trust that you understand that, as a shared mail environment, it is in everyone's very best interests to ensure that best practices are being followed. Failure to follow best practices may result in the blocklisting of the shared mail server, which will prevent mail from being sent for all accounts on the server.
Repeat offenders (compromised email accounts or domains) may be permanently removed from the mail server.