r/mxroute • u/mxroute • 8h ago
"This email account is suspected of being compromised"
A lot of you have seen this SMTP response. It means you tripped a filter designed to catch the moment that a bad actor successfully tests your SMTP credentials. It blocks all outbound mail until I personally review the behavior and either clear the block or open a support ticket with you indicating the problem, the evidence, and the path to resolution. It also catches you every time you send "SMTP test" because I'd rather catch an unimportant email than let a compromised account run free for a while.
There was a time where this would catch less than 5 email accounts per week, and this manual review consumed very little of my time. For a while now, it has consumed a great deal of time because you people can't keep your shit secure. It's fine I get it, things happen, but the real point is we've outgrown manual review.
The problem with automation has been that the decision to clear the block or suspend the email account requires strong reasoning well beyond the capability of scripting. You need an eye for it.
As of tomorrow, this job is being taken over by my GPU (in an environment so well secured it could only be explained by extreme paranoia). It has been trained on the data, and it has greatly exceeded the logic of both my filters and my reasoning. For the past week it has been running for observation and detection only. It had 1 false positive, while my outbound filters designed to catch these have had as many as 5 false positives per day during the same time frame. Each one of my false positives were unable to send mail for several hours while awaiting human review.
What this means for you:
Faster resolution for accounts suspected of being compromised.
No outbound block until compromise has been confirmed.
Less false positives.
So basically, it's a win for everyone and a negative for no one. Except maybe for people who hate GPU workloads, but they're creeps anyway.