What kind of spider is this please? Southern Indiana. Very strong web

Question

It never comes out during the day so it's been hard to get a decent picture. We have been battling over ownership of my mailbox. It's a house box and every morning it's covered in cobweb from it to the siding or across the top of it if the lid was left up. Very strong web, it takes effort to get it off. I was going to put up a new one with a sealed lid but would kind of like to know if it's poisonous before I go messing about the battle grounds.

Answer 1

Even with lightening your photo:

It is difficult to ID this to genus. If you are only interested in knowing whether it is a medically significant spider, you can rest assured that it is not. The (few) markings and shape of it are enough to rule out widows and recluses.

From its shape and habitus, it is likely a cobweb weaver of some kind (family Theridiidae), but there are many possible choices for genus unless you can get a clearer photo. While black widows are also Theridiidae, the medically-significant female widows have solid black legs while we can see leg banding in this specimen. As @anongoodnurse points out in the comments, the legs here are shorter than a black widow's legs, so I would even rule out a male widow. The abdomen here is rounder shape than the tear-drop abdomen with a tapered end that a widow has. (Similarly, recluses do not have banded legs and do not hang in webs like this Araneoid is. And there are no other medically significant spiders you need to worry about in your geographic area).

The leg banding, general shape, and the slight white marking on the abdomen we can see in the lightened photo make this a little reminiscent of Enoplognatha marmorata (like this one https://bugguide.net/node/view/646186/bgimage). It is very rare to find Enoplognatha indoors.

Here is an example of an E. marmorata found in Indiana: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/107343897