Security improvements via spam filtering (SpamSnake)

What is this about?

As technology improves, we like to improve our systems and setups too. We do this has we look to provide the best services possible, but to also beat the bad guys.

The improvements we have coming throughout July are all email based, and for customers who have our spam filtering service.

What improvements are being made?

DKIM

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method designed to detect email spoofing. It allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed sent by the owner of that domain. It is intended to prevent forged sender addresses in emails, a technique often used in phishing and email spam. In technical terms, DKIM lets a domain associate its name with an email message by affixing a digital signature to it.

Throughout July we will be adding these signatures to outgoing emails, and as part of that we might ask you to contact your web hosting provider (if not us) to update the DNS records for this.

Once done recipients of your emails will be able to validate your messages using their filtering systems improving email protection.

Unfortunately if the recipient does not use any email filtering/protection this will not help you.

DMARC

DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”, is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol. It builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, adding linkage to the author (“From:”) domain name, published policies for recipient handling of authentication failures, and reporting from receivers to senders, to improve and monitor protection of the domain from fraudulent email.

Once again  if the recipient does not use any email filtering/protection this will not help you.

Routing Rules and Security

To improve security between our spam filtering platform (SpamSnake) and your email servers, we will be introducing rules to lock down transport between both systems.

Spam Reporting

To aid in reporting spam emails, or even ham emails (wanted but incorrectly caught). We have been working on an add-in for Microsoft Outlook for simple buttons to report it to us for analysis.

We will use the samples of these supplied emails via the buttons to improve the detection of spam, in turn creating a safer & cleaner inbox.