Imagine you wake up in the morning and discover your inbox is full of random and weird emails. Or you’re working on your desktop when suddenly a bunch of emails appear out of nowhere. You get curious about those emails and click on an attachment. Boom! Now you don’t need to click anything anymore—the rest of the work will be done by the hackers.
What is Email Bombing?
Email bombing, also known as email spam, mail bombing, is a method where a hacker sends thousands—sometimes millions—of spam emails to a targeted email address, causing a serious server DDoS and sometimes even taking down the mail server. These emails are so professionally written that most users have a hard time ignoring them because of how authentic they look. While email bombing itself isn’t powerful enough to hack a server, hackers use this trick as a decoy for their main attack.
Why is it dangerous?
After reading the first paragraph, you might be laughing, thinking a mail bomb is more annoying than threatening. Make no mistake—it can be weaponized with precision:
- Decoy for a real attack: A mail bomb attack can temporarily distract the cyber team. As a result, hackers gain more time to carry out their intentions—like stealing login credentials, cookies, information, or credit card details—while you’re busy cleaning out spam emails.
- DDoS: Attackers can DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) a user’s inbox, paralyzing their ability to see critical security emails such as password resets or login alerts.
- Burnout by Design: For companies—especially small businesses—a targeted email spam attack can overwhelm staff, crash email servers, and lead to lost clients, missed opportunities, or even legal trouble.
Who Is Behind It?
Email bombing doesn’t require high-level hacking skills; most of the scripts are pre-built and available on the dark web
or GitHub. That makes them a favorite tool for:
- Hacktivists protesting organizations
- Cyberbullies targeting individuals
- Competitors trying to sabotage rival businesses
- Cybercriminals creating diversions during other attacks
Think like a hacker
There’s a proverb: “If you want to be a hacker, think like a hacker—imagination is power.” Let’s do that. Suppose you
want to annoy a shop owner using fake customers or fake orders. Here are some challenges you’d face:
- What methods should you use?
- What’s the most effective way?
What if you hired 100 actors to place orders instead? Then the shop owner would likely think they’re genuine customers—and fall for the scam. That’s exactly what hackers want. They use thousands—even millions—of branded and unbranded email addresses for the email bomb process, so the victim falls for the scam, making the attack more effective.
But enough of teaching scams. Let’s discuss how the shop owner could prevent such an attack. One solution is rate-limiting the order system—for instance, allowing only 10 orders per day. Another is manually verifying customer details like address and contact number.
A Victim’s Interview
Maria runs a small digital shop where she sells digital goods and pays for people who don’t have international credit/debit cards. Her business acts like a payment gateway—for example, she collects local currency from customers and then pays for the product using international currencies like dollars or euros.
Unlike other sites, she receives orders via email. Everything was going well until a “hyena” (her word for the attacker) destroyed everything. She faced a massive mail bomb attack that crashed her mail server. She immediately contacted a cybersecurity expert—but it was too late.
She said: “I had several conversations, orders, and support data stored inside the mail server. I lost all that data, which caused me legal tax issues. I was suspended from running my shop for the next two months.” To fix and clean the server, she had to spend $200.
Prevention
Preventing mail bomb attacks remains a challenge, as spammers and hackers continue to find ways to manipulate anti-spam systems. After two weeks of research, I found several methods that can help prevent such attacks:
- Rate Limitation: Implement a system or script that adds a cooldown before sending emails to the same address. The cooldown should be up to forty minutes.
- Using Virtual Computers: Tools like VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer, or VirtualBox can protect your system from phishing attacks, session hijacking, and more. Any files sent via email should be opened using a virtual machine.
- Hiring Adaptive Cybersecurity Experts: Hire professionals who are familiar with modern cyberattacks and capable of writing or advising on secure code for your software.
- Masking Email Addresses: Use human verification CAPTCHAs when sharing your email address publicly.
- Mail Forwarding: Instead of giving out individual employee email addresses, route all incoming messages to a single inbox and forward them to the appropriate recipients.
- Using Better Email Hosting Providers: Small businesses should rely on reputable email hosting services like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ProtonMail, or Fastmail, which regularly update their security protocols.
Conclusion
A mail bomb isn’t just an irritation—it’s a digital denial-of-service attack aimed directly at your most essential communication tool. It’s cheap, effective, and disturbingly common. In an era where everything from password resets to job applications depends on email, protecting your inbox is more critical than ever.
Stay vigilant, stay clean, and maybe think twice before handing out your email like free candy.