(615) 443-4842

Email has been around since the beginning of the internet. It has become a staple for business. But it is also a medium for sending viruses, phishing, ransomware and other malware.

If you only use personal email, this may not mean a whole lot to you. Your email provider should be handling Email security in the background.

However, you still may be affected even if you are only using personal email. And by reading the rest of this email you’ll at least understand what may be happening if you stop receiving email from your doctor, your bank, financial advisors, pharmacy, travel spots, airlines, etc.

Almost all businesses I’ve known in the past 20 plus years cut costs during economic downturns in order to save money.

The price cuts in IT usually revolve around not updating websites, security, computers, etc. Unfortunately, this leaves the businesses increasingly vulnerable to security risks which will cost the business significantly more money than preventative maintenance. It will also increase downtime due to website and email errors.

Google, Microsoft, AWS and other major email providers are attempting to crack down on the billions of spam emails being sent out and received daily. In the past month, several clients have had their business email bounced, or flagged as potential spam. This resulted in delayed projects, frustrated employees and frustrated contractors.

To prevent this from happening, there are changes to specific settings that need to be made or updated to the business domain cPanel email section called MX records. If your business domain website hasn’t been updated on a regular basis, including these records, you could be losing business due to lost emails.

With the crackdown, new acronyms need to be learned such as DMARC, PTR, DMIK, Reverse DNS lookup, PTR, SPF, DNS.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) is a standard email authentication method. DMARC helps mail administrators prevent hackers and other attackers from spoofing their organization and domain. Spoofing is a type of attack in which the From address of an email message is forged.

A PTR (or Pointer) record is a security tool. Essentially, when you receive an email, your mail server uses the PTR record that comes in with the email message to check that the mail server sending the email matches the IP address that it claims to be using. This is also known as “reverse DNS lookup.”

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) uses a DNS (Domain Name Service) entry to specify a list of servers that are allowed to send email for a specific domain. Its security relies on the fact that only authorized domain administrators are allowed to make changes to the domain DNS zone records.

Hopefully, the email issues will settle down in the next several months. But in the meantime, you’re “in the know” about what’s going on.

Give us a call at 615-443-4842 so we can do a free analysis of your systems to make sure everything is running smooth and secure.

All the best and stay well,
Jim Nay

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