LuxSci has implemented a number of enhancements which add to its already stringent security and high reliability of services.  These features cover areas such as login security, password resets, SecureLine encryption, Widget backups, and more. The enhancements are listed below, by service.

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SecureLine Escrow is the facet of LuxSci’s SecureLine service that allows users to send encrypted email messages to anyone with an email address.  With Escrow, the message is encrypted and stored in a secure database.  A notification message is sent to the recipient that informs them of a message waiting, along with the subject of the message and sender. The notification also provides a link to use to retrieve the secure message.

See “Send a Secure Email to Anyone” for more about how Escrow works.

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LuxSci offers many options for email security. Whether it is PGP, S/MIME, LuxSci’s SecureLine end-to-end email encryption, or forced secure logins over SSL, LuxSci can guide you in making the best choices for secure and safe email.

End-to-end email encryption is one way to ensure that your email can only be read by the intended recipients. SSL and TLS connections are secure, but only to a point. While you can ensure that your users connect securely to LuxSci’s servers, who is to say that your recipient’s connection is secure? With LuxSci SecureLine, even if the recipient’s connection isn’t secure, you can be assured that your message is sent securely and can only be read by whom you intended.

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To address the request of many clients, LuxSci has simplified the process of picking up SecureLine Escrow encrypted email messages.  This change makes message pickup faster and easier and improves the usability of the SecureLine service overall.

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LuxSci’s High Volume Outbound Email Sending Service, released earlier this year, has been a notable success.  Our service permits the sending of legitimate bulk email messages and also provides reliable “smarthost” services.  However, the offering is restricted to SMTP services and does not include the many outbound email processing tools present in LuxSci’s Premium Email service.  I.e. see  LuxSci Outbound Email: 5 Sending Options Compared!

Since High Volume Mail was offered, we have had many requests to send HIPAA-compliant bulk outbound email, i.e. newsletters and notices that contain protected health information (PHI) .  In such cases, SecureLine should be used to encrypt the outbound email in a way that can be opened by any recipient, but which is still secure.  Unfortunately, integration with SecureLine is not a feature of our Basic High Volume service.

LuxSci has responded by releasing Premium High Volume Outbound Email Service.  This is essentially Premium Email hosting with:

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LuxSci has offered “Private Labeling” for many years.  This feature allows customers to customize the look and feel of the WebMail and SecureLine interfaces to match the branding of their web site or organization’s colors.

Private Labeling tools now include:

• 11 new color schemes that can be selected to quickly configure WebMail to match your organization’s general color scheme.
• A new Private Labeled Theme Creation Wizard that allows you to select a color scheme plus upload your logo.  The Wizard will then create a professional looking standard theme.  Our wizard makes it easy and fast to create a theme that matches your organization’s branding — no HTML or programming skill is needed.
• A “Look and Feel Wizard” that allows anyone with an existing Private Labeled theme to similarly select a color scheme and upload a logo to re-design their theme using one of the new styles.
• Better organized theme management to further simplify theme access and configuration.

Read receipt requests are generally an extremely unreliable way to find out if your recipient has read an email messages that you have sent to him/her.

Why? Because

• Some email programs do not support read receipts, and thus messages viewed with these would never send you a notice that the message was read.
• Programs that do support read receipts allow the user to respond to them “always”, “never”, or “ask each time” … with “asking each time” being the default.  As a result, users often will decline your request for a receipt that you have read the message.

However, when messages are sent via LuxSci’s SecureLine Escrow encryption service, read receipts are guaranteed to work.

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LuxSci has improved the look and feel of the SecureLine Escrow and SecureSend portals.  In the process, the maximum message size that can be sent from these portals has been raised from 20 Megabytes to 50 Megabytes (raw size) and the maximum number of attachments on one of these secure messages has been raised from 3 to 20 files.

The SecureSend portal allows anyone with an email address to send secure email messages to any LuxSci SecureLine user for free.  The SecureLine Escrow portal is where recipients who do not have PGP or S/MIME capability go to pick up secure email messages sent to them from LuxSci SecureLine users.

We recently discussed email security for accountants and mentioned that the use of password-protected files is not usually a very good solution for meeting data privacy needs.  After writing this and getting some feed back, we thought that the issue of password-protected files really deserves some further discussion.  Many people are under the assumption that if they use the “password protection” features of whatever software they are using, that their data is safe and secure.  However, this is not necessarily the case.  Why?

Using password-protected files to secure data is fast and easy and built into many applications.  Why not use it?  Certainly, password protecting files is much better than not doing so.  However, there are several things that determine how secure these “protected” files really are.

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Everyone always harps on the necessity of privacy when discussing health care, government, and banking communications.  It is surprising how little attention is paid to email security with regards to accounting and tax preparation.   There is a real danger of identity theft, unintended information disclosure, as well as invasion of privacy when using tax preparation services or organizations that do not use secure email.  Why is this?

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