Generally, when you send an email message and it fails to be delivered, you get a “bounce back” to inform you of this.  This delivery failure notification system is inherent in the way email works and does a good job, in general.  However, it has some serious limitations:

• The failure notice is spam filtered or otherwise lost, you will never know the message wasn’t delivered.
• Email spoofing is prevalent and that can cause you to receive all kinds of “backscatter” failure notices about messages that you never sent.  As a result, you may be blocking or deleting failure messages or may merely not notice a real failure notice amidst the back scatter garbage.
• The failure messages are long and in varied formats.  It may be difficult for the average person to determine the actual reason for the failure.
• If you have many failure messages (e.g. because you are sending out a newsletter) it is hard to convert a bunch of failure messages into a list of failed recipients together with the reasons for the failures.
• It is not simple for a manager to get reports of send failures by his/her staff … which may be very important so that business opportunities are not lost.

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What happened to that email message that I sent 3 days ago?  It “never arrived!”.

Our Support team fields this kind of question on a daily basis.  Usually the message never arrived because the address was misspelled, the message was never actually sent, or it was filtered by the recipient’s servers.  There are many other reasons why messages “disappear” as well.

Customers sending email to mailing lists (e.g. those using LuxSci High Volume services), often want an easy way to find out what addresses failed and why, and to know for sure what messages were delivered properly.

Now, LuxSci customers can see for themselves exactly what messages have been sent and track them to learn what the disposition of any particular message to any recipient is at any time.  The new reporting tools are fast, easy, and no longer require the assistance of Support.

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MobileSync, LuxSci’s mobile device synchronization solution, which includes real-time synchronization of email, calendars, contacts, and tasks and works on all modern mobile devices, is made possible by a close collaboration between LuxSci and NuevaSync.  NuevaSync is a leader in providing ActiveSync-based synchronization solutions without Microsoft Exchange servers.

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It is often thought that Viruses and Malware are the biggest threats to your personal information, but there is even a greater threat that often goes undetected. Social Engineering is a technique used by people to gather your personal or secure information without you even thinking twice about giving it away. Social Engineering is most often performed over the phone, but could just as easily be done via email, text messaging, or any other form of communication; you can be Social Engineered by anyone.

In the most basic form, Social Engineering is when someone poses as someone else (i.e. a trusted friend or colleague) to trick you into divulging sensitive information.  ”Hey, this is PayPal, please follow this link and re-enter all your banking details — its ok, really!”

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Many of our customers require that electronic digital signatures be added to outbound email messages.  Here we discuss what these are, what they do for you, and how to add them using LuxSci SecureLine email encryption.

What are Digital Signatures?

In short, adding a digital signature to an email message allows:

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Customers often ask how they can know if a message has been read by a specific recipient.  Typically, this is done by requesting a “Read Receipt” when sending the message; however, read receipts are not reliable.  Spammers use techniques such as HTML “web bug” tracking to see if you have read an email message and thus if your email address is valid and ripe for more spamming; this is also not reliable. LuxSci’s SecureLine Escrow service includes a 100% reliable Read Receipt function that can be used when it is essential to know if someone has read a message. It also allows for message retraction (removing further access to an email message).

This article goes over these various methods of determining if a message has been read, shows how each works, and discusses the pros and cons of each.

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LuxSci has introduced a number of per-domain security features that allow us to offer accounts that contain both HIPAA-complaint domains and non-compliant domains.

Previously, customers could order such a combination of domains, but they were segregated into completely separate accounts.  These new security features benefit our customers because:

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LuxSci has made several enhancements to its WebAide Calendar features.  These include an improved printable Monthly view of your calendars and the ability to have event attachments in email messages auto-added to your calendars

Email To Calendar

WebAide-licensed users can now create Custom Email Filters that match selected messages with calendar attachments (e.g. events, invitations, iCal files, etc.) and have these items automatically added to a calendar of their choice.

This feature allows users who frequently receive events by email to have these automatically populate their calendars without any action needed.  Once in their calendars, these events are immediately visible in LuxSci’s web interface and immediately synchronize with users’ mobile devices via our Mobile Sync service.

LuxSci has updated its WebMail interface to provide a much tighter integration with its Documents WebAides. In particular, users with a Premium WebAide license can now:

• Send any email attachment directly to a Documents WebAide from the WebMail message view screens. No need to download and re-upload files.  No need to switch between WebMail and Documents WebAide interfaces.  Its fast and easy: click a link next to the attachment and a small dialog appears where you then select the Documents WebAide to send the file to.
• Add files from your Documents WebAides to new email messages.  When composing email messages in WebMail, you can now select files from any of your Documents WebAides in the email “Attachments” tab of the composer.  Multiple files from various WebAides can be added with just a few clicks.  Even encrypted files can be decrypted and attached to your email message with a click.

With these updates, Documents WebAides become much easier to use as a central repository of your files.

LuxSci’s WebAide Calendars and Address Books have been improved to allows users to easily send contacts and events to other people via email as vCard and iCal attachments.

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