September 2014: The Month in Email

September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape.
We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of these tools we use every day 40 years later. We followed up with a second post on the origins of network email, which is a great primer (or refresher) on the early days of email.
Steve’s four-part series on cryptography and email started with an in-depth look at how the industry is evolving with respect to encryption and privacy issues. He then introduced us to Alice and Bob (or reintroduced those of us who have been following the adventures of the first couple of cryptography), and described symmetric-key and public-key encryption. His next post described message signing, and how DKIM is used to manage this. He finished up the series with a post on PGP keys.
In industry news: Spamcop is shutting down its email service. There shouldn’t be any major impact on senders, but the post has some specific notes on DMARC implications. We also noted an interesting mail routing suggestion on Twitter, and wrote a post on using Mail.app for this.
In other DMARC news, we wrote about DMARC and report size limits, which might be useful information, depending on your configuration. We also launched a new DMARC tool to help senders understand who is publishing DMARC. Let us know what you think and if you’re finding it useful.
We couldn’t let a month go by without mentioning filters. We looked at a sector we don’t usually discuss, corporate filtering, and went in-depth on a much-misunderstood topic, content filtering.
Finally, Laura offered a webinar on a favorite topic, deliverability, in conjunction with the AMA and Message Systems. If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version here, or just take a peek at some of the reaction via Twitter.