I don’t always do predictions posts, even though they’re popular. Most years I skip them because I don’t see major changes in the email space. And, I’m not the type to just write a prediction post just to post a prediction. This year, though, I do see changes for everyone in the email space. Most of them center on finally having to deal with the technical debt that’s been accumulating over the...
When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values. If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX}...
Like many bits of technology, email is often set-and-forget. Everything is checked and rechecked during setup, and then no one goes back and looks at it again. But mail programs are not static, and people make changes. These changes don’t really break things, but over time they can create their own set of problems. Setting aside some time every quarter or even every year to check and make...
Terry Zink at Microsoft posted earlier this week that Office365/Exchange Online Protection will have a significant change this week. Office365 uses Exchange Online Protection (EOP) for spam filtering and email protection. One of the requirements to send to EOP over IPv6 is to have the email authenticated with either SPF or DKIM. If the mail sent to Office365/EOP over IPv6 is not authenticated...
Email Authentication lets you demonstrate that you sent a particular email. Email Repudiation is a claim that you didn’t send a particular email. SPF is only for email authentication1 DKIM is only for email authentication DMARC is only for email repudiation 1 SPF was originally intended to provide repudiation, but it didn’t work reliably enough to be useful. Nobody uses...
Last month I wrote about how Salesforce was implementing the ability to sign emails sent from Salesforce CRM with DKIM. The Spring 15 update is now live as is the ability to use an existing DKIM key or allow Salesforce to create a new one for you. Setting up DKIM within Salesforce is straightforward. A Salesforce Administrator would go to Setup->Email Administration->DKIM Keys. You can...
This was a short and busy month at WttW! We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking...
Salesforce has published a SPF record for sending emails from Salesforce for years and with the Spring ’15 release, they will provide the option to sign with DKIM. The SPF record is straight forward, include:_spf.salesforce.com which includes _spf.google.com, _spfblock.salesforce.com, several IP address blocks, mx, and ends with a SoftFail ~all. Salesforce Knowledge Article Number:...
There are 3 types of authentication currently in use for email. DKIM SPF DMARC The different strategies do different things with email. DKIM cryptographically signs emails, preventing changes in transit, and designates a “responsible domain” through the d= value in the signature. SPF compare the sending IP and the envelope from (also known as the bounce string, return path or 5321...
According to a recent blog post, Office365 is starting to evaluate incoming messages for DMARC. I talked a little bit about DMARC in April when Yahoo started publishing a p=reject message. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What DMARC does is allow domain owners to publish policy statements in DNS telling receiver domains what to do with messages that...
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