It is not unusual to receive notices that your email account is over quota, or that you have requested to delete your mail account, or that someone has infected your computer when you visited a porn site. Generally such mails require you to act within a short deadline, either to prevent your account from being deleted, or pay a ransom in Bitcoin, or whatever the email is about. These mails are designed to create fear and cause you to react quickly and instinctively to click on a link in the mail and take some action.
Before you do anything, stop! Reread the mail slowly and consider carefully what it says. Is it consistent with what you know you did or did not do? If you did not request that your email account be deleted, ignore and delete the email. If you did not visit a porn site – a common accusation in a ransomware mail – you can ignore and delete the mail.
It is generally safe to delete all emails indicating that your account is over quota, but check a few important details. Is it signed by a generic title like “Service Department,” or similar? A legitimate message should be signed by the actual service provider; if in doubt, contact your email service provider for more information.
To check the actual quota on your FishNet hosted email account, log into your account by webmail, which you can click to from our web site. In the lower left corner there will be a small pie chart and a numeric percent that shows your email quota.
Such emails are unusual enough that they may not be caught by spam filters. Spam filters work by a complex analysis of an email’s content; in particular, they analyze mails using criteria that are different than how humans read them. Spam filter analysis is designed to catch the majority of junk emails; they are generally very good at that, but they cannot reliably filter every email someone might not want to see. Sometimes filters may need to err on the side of caution; not every account quota notice or deletion notice is bogus, and distinguishing them may be best left to a person.
If you have any questions about a particular email, please feel free to contact us.