Why am I receiving emails from my own domain that I did not send?

There are 2 main causes of emails that you did not send out and that are being received in your (or other people's) mailboxes:

1. The email address of the sender was faked (called email spoofing), a very common spamming technique used by illegitimate senders. 
2. Your hosting account or email was compromised, and you are receiving error messages returned by failed addresses (also called bouncebacks)

The first scenario is by far the most frequent, and generally applies when the emails are being received from an email address on your domain that doesn't actually exist (for example jondoe123@yourdomain.com, where the user jondoe123 was never actually created). Since anyone with a minimal knowledge of emails and servers can falsify the sender's address in an email and pretend they're sending it from your domain, it's difficult (if not impossible) to actually prevent these from being sent. The best way to protect yourself against spoofing is by enabling an email configuration at the DNS level called SPF and configuring your antispam filters to be more strict so that it filters out these types of messages. You can find out how to do this by consulting the following article: http://clients.whc.ca/knowledgebase/113/How-to-Reduce-SpamorJunk-Mail.html

If you suspect that your email address or hosting account got hacked (scenario 2), we strongly recommend that you immediately change your email password and hosting account password. You can change your hosting account password from Web Hosting Canada's Client Area, and you can change your email password from your control panel (cPanel), available from the Services section of your Client Area. You can also contact our support team via live chat or support ticket if you'd like us to further investigate the matter for you. In the event that your account was hacked and is used to send out spam, our SiteSafe service is a fast and effective way to perform a full security cleanup and review.

If you are unsure which scenario applies, feel free to get in touch with our friendly support team by phone, live chat, or support ticket. We're available 24/7 and we're here to help!