New Feature Announcements Archives

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New Email Authentication Requirements from Google and Yahoo: What You Need to Know

Tuesday, December 12th, 2023

Google and Yahoo have recently announced their latest updates aimed at reducing spam and spoofed emails.

These updates affect everyone sending emails to Google or Yahoo users. They apply fundamental authentication requirements to regular email, and further requirements apply to those sending higher volumes of bulk emails. These new requirements apply to all email platforms and service providers.

Please note: Many of these new requirements are technical in nature and will require access to your DNS management. You may learn more about these DNS concepts in this LuxSci blog: Understanding DNS Configurations for Email Security: A Guide to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Records.

As a reminder, it is imperative that you adhere to strong email best practices. Here’s what you need to continue doing on top of your email game:

All senders emailing Yahoo or Gmail:

Add DNS SPF records for every domain you use to send emails to authenticate your emails.
Add DNS DKIM Records for every domain you use to send emails to further authenticate your emails.

While many have added SPF records in 2023, it’s now crucial to also have DKIM records in place.

For those sending large volumes of emails to Google or Yahoo users (over 5,000 messages on some days)

Complete the requirements required for all senders.
Implement DNS DMARC: Set up a DNS DMARC email authentication policy for your domains. You can set your DMARC enforcement policy to “none.”
Align Your Domains: Ensure the domain used for bounce processing (i.e., the “Return-Path”) matches/is aligned with your From domain in every email.
Include Easy Unsubscribe Options: Include a one-click unsubscribe option for marketing and subscription emails.

Google’s new requirements begin on February 1st, 2024, and Yahoo will follow in the first quarter of 2024. Aim to make these changes by the end of January 2024.

LuxSci customers will need to:

Ensure a DNS Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record.
Ensure a DNS DKIM record is in place.
Implement a DNS DMARC record.
For marketing and subscription emails, enable and use LuxSci’s “Unsubscribe Links” feature.
For those using LuxSci Bounce Processing, enable the user of a Custom Bounce Processing domain for every sending domain to ensure that these domains are aligned.

These steps will help ensure your emails continue to reach your audience effectively and responsibly. Without them, messages to Google and Yahoo! recipients may go directly to their Spam folders or be rejected.

As always, your LuxSci team is here to help clarify or provide further guidance. We are happy to support you and help you successfully navigate through these changes.

You may read more about these requirements at the following links:

Tags: dkim, DMARC, dns, email deliverability, google, high volume email, shv, spam, spf, yahoo!
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email, New Feature Announcements
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New From LuxSci: Updates to the WebMail Portal

Monday, July 17th, 2023

LuxSci is pleased to announce that the first phase of design and user experience improvements has been deployed on the LuxSci WebMail portal.

In the first phase of updates, you will notice significant changes to the main navigation and organization of the portal. These developments reflect our commitment to:

Supporting customers’ business workflows and processes
Streamlining the administrative experience
Improving ease of use for customers of all technical backgrounds
Providing an accessible online experience
Modernizing our brand

Over the next few months, we will continue to iterate on these changes and introduce additional updates. If you have any questions about the new interface, please contact our support team. Thank you for partnering with LuxSci and trusting us to secure your data.

Tags: luxsci news, new feature, software updates, ui, webmail
Posted in LuxSci Insider, New Feature Announcements
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New Feature Announcement: Automated Reporting with Webhooks

Monday, February 27th, 2023

The LuxSci team is pleased to announce the release of automated reporting with webhooks to help organizations manage their data workflows. These updates will allow administrators to push information and analytics from their email campaigns into existing dashboards or to email recipients in close to real time.

“Webhooks give us the ability to receive real-time notifications and events from LuxSci in bulk, which will streamline our internal analysis, reporting, and, therefore, decision-making,” said Katie Ali, Product Manager at Signify Health.

“Today, our analysis is limited due to the number of resources we have on hand to pull email data. Now that we are implementing webhooks, we can start to automate the analytic process from end to end. Webhooks also eliminate the complexity of a reoccurring polling logic to achieve the same effect.”

What are Webhooks?

A webhook is an HTTP request triggered by an event in a source system and sent to a destination system. In other words, webhooks push data to the customer’s website URL for processing.

LuxSci’s webhooks are available for all our API reports, including email sending, delivery status changes, email opens, email clicks, login failures, and unsubscribes.

In addition to traditional webhooks that post data to a URL, LuxSci also allows API reports to be automatically sent via TLS-encrypted email to any email address at a custom frequency. The report data is attached to the email in JSON, CSV, or HTML format.

Why are LuxSci’s Webhooks Useful?

Webhooks allow customers to automatically push information about email events via LuxSci’s API as they are happening without pulling from the API. That allows customers to record and review this information and take timely action based on these events.

LuxSci’s webhooks are incredibly scalable, unlike those of many other providers. Instead of sending one webhook notification to the customer for each event (which could be millions of notifications a day), LuxSci sends a digest of all events that happened over a specified period. By sending a digest instead of individual notifications, it is easier to process the notifications at scale. Batching the notifications reduces the server resources the customer requires to receive and process high volumes of webhooks by a significant amount.

Our webhooks are also resilient to customer webhook processing service failure. LuxSci will automatically retry webhook delivery when customer processing servers are down or failing, so events are less likely to be lost than webhooks provided by other services.

How to Set Up Automated Reporting with Webhooks

Login to your LuxSci account and visit the Report section of the user interface. In the sidebar, select Automated Reports. First, you will need to select the data you want to report. Choose from API reports including:

Emails sent
Delivery status updates
Emails opened
Emailed links clicked
SMTP login failures
Email addresses suppressed or unsubscribed
Emails marked as spam

Then select the data source (either SMTP/API or WebMail). The reports can include account-wide events or can be restricted to only certain users. Name the report and how frequently you want to check for new events. Webhooks reporting is configurable to any desired granularity from once every minute to once a day.

Reports will only be sent when there are new events. For example, a report with five-minute intervals checks for new events every five minutes but only sends a report if there are new events.

Finally, choose how the data should be delivered (via a webhook or email with TLS encryption) and in what format for email reports (JSON, HTML, or CSV). Enter an email address to notify if there are errors with the report, and then you can enable it.

Automated reports can be further customized by using parameters. For example, they help limit reporting to specific domains, campaigns, or email headers. Please contact our team today to learn more about how LuxSci’s Automated Reporting can enhance your data workflows.

Tags: analytics, api, automation, data workflows, email reports, operational efficiency, webhooks
Posted in New Feature Announcements
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New Feature: API Priority Queue

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022

Maximize efficiency by employing our new email-sending prioritization features. Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs for sending can now set a message priority to determine the order in which messages are sent out.

What is the API Priority Queue Feature?

This feature allows customers to set a priority on email messages sent via API. Customers can pass an optional parameter in their API to set the message priority on a scale of 0 – 9. Zero is the lowest priority, nine is the highest, and four is the default priority setting.

The API priority queue feature allows customers to send out higher-priority messages faster when the sending queue is already long.

Why is the API Priority Queue Useful?

Traditionally, all customer emails were processed in a “first come, first serve” method. Customers can now use the priority queue to determine the sending order when they simultaneously send transactional and marketing messages via the API.

For example, time-sensitive password resets could be stuck in the queue while a large blast of marketing emails is transmitted. Depending on the size of the email list and server capacity, the password reset email could be held up for several minutes to even hours. This situation is unacceptable for many business use cases.

Customers can designate transactional emails as high-priority with the API priority queue feature enabled. When transactional emails are given a high-priority status, they can jump the line and go out before less time-sensitive emails like marketing messages.

How to Utilize the API Priority Queue

This feature is only available to Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs to send emails. It does not work for SMTP sending. Customers can add the optional parameter and desired value while crafting their API call to send emails. Additionally, customers can use the API configuration editor in the LuxSci UI to change the default priority value for all messages. You can review the details of our API by going to: https://luxsci.com/rest-api.html.

Tags: api, email api, luxsci news, marketing email, new feature, password reset, secure high volume, secure high volume email, sending priority, sending queue, Transactional email
Posted in New Feature Announcements
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New from LuxSci: Accessibility Updates to SecureLine Escrow and SecureSend Portals

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

LuxSci is happy to announce that new accessibility features are now enabled in the SecureLine Escrow and SecureSend portals. These enhancements improve the portals’ usability and provide a more inclusive experience for people with disabilities. Everyone should be able to use the internet, and proper accessibility guarantees that.

What is Accessibility?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, helps ensure that anyone with a disability will receive the same opportunities as an individual without a disability. Some of the most visible changes included requiring new buildings have wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms. However, this law does not exclusively apply to physical infrastructure but also to online services. Poor technology implementations should not prevent people from accessing information online.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make accessibility more manageable for web designers and developers. The W3C is an international community that develops regulations and recommendations for the internet to help ensure its longevity and usability. The W3C established the WCAG standards to provide detailed guidelines for creating websites, digital content, and markup through accessible approaches that work seamlessly with assistive technologies used by people with disabilities.

Accessibility Updates to the LuxSci SecureLine Escrow and SecureSend Portals

LuxSci primarily serves the healthcare industry, and equal access to health information is critical. Everyone should be able to access important information about their health status online. We worked with compliance experts to update the SecureSend and SecureLine Escrow portals to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. We are continuing to improve the accessibility of our website to ensure we provide equal access to all our users. LuxSci is committed to making our SecureSend website as accessible as possible to people with disabilities, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive, and motor impairments.

Don’t hesitate to contact customer service with any specific questions or concerns about the accessibility of any particular web page or feature. We will respond to feedback within ten business days. We thank you for your assistance in enhancing the accessibility of our website, and we look forward to serving your needs!

Tags: accessibility, email portals, new feature, secureline escrow, securesend
Posted in New Feature Announcements
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