How do spam email accounts get onto devices? My mom recently asked me about an email inbox on her phone called "My Weather". She didn't know what it was or how it got on the phone. It had 200+ emails in it and all were product or service offers from obscure websites. Basically just spam. Although, amusingly, there were new emails every day with a weather forecast. Funny. Anyway I checked email settings on the phone and there was an email account that was not my mom's with an address that went something like "FirstnameLastname157@minbox.email". There was no option to delete it like a normal account so I looked up minbox.email and found an Apple discussion forum on it. While this explains how to delete it, I want to know how it got on the phone in the first place, and what exactly it is. It must have been from a link in Safari or an email that opened something in Safari. I didn't think this was possible on iOS or any mobile device. I found very little information when searching for it. Maybe if I checked the next few Google pages... But you would think something like this would be a popular topic on forums. I did find this website which seems very suspicious: https://minbox.com/ Although this website asks you to enter an email address and it looks very poorly made, it's not definitive evidence that that's where the software came from. 

If anyone has any information about this it would be greatly appreciated.
Check http:// minbox.email/join#/ (not linking them here though, don't want to generate traffic to their site); they offer a free email inbox in exchange of receiving spam. As of how they configure the email account on your device, it appears that it is made through a Configuration Profile.
I tried to verify myself by creating an email but couldn't end the process because of an error on their end.

You or anyone can create a configuration profile to


  (...)quickly distribute groups of settings and access powerful
  management features that aren’t normally available.


Then 


  You could email the configuration profile to someone–including
  yourself–or offer it for download on a website. When someone taps the
  email attachment in the Mail app or downloads the configuration
  profile file from a website, they’ll be prompted to install it on
  their iPhone or iPad.


(from this article).

Note that your mother would have had to accept the prompt in order to apply the Configuration Profile.

It's also important to understand that this may be a vehicle for malicious configurations as explained in this article.