How do you ensure your messages make it into your recipients’ INBOXes?

Deliverability is key to anyone sending newsletters, announcements, notifications, or any other type of bulk email.  As a provider of premium and bulk email services, we constantly advise customers on how they can legitimately avoid having messages marked as spam and ensure that they are not black listed. In this article, we consolidate our advice for everyone’s benefit.  This includes: ensuring you have a good mailing list, maintaining your mailing list, email message content, and reputation management techniques like SPF, DKIM, and IP anonymization.

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LuxSci has long supported SPF for inbound and outbound email.  SPF is a mechanism by which you can specify what servers are permitted to send email for your domain … and identify email from other places that may be fraudulent. This helps stop inbound Spam and helps ensure that your own messages are distinguished from any fraudulently sent ones by your recipients.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is the other standard for preventing email forgery.  DKIM works by cryptographically signing each email message sent.  The recipients can use information published in your DNS settings to verify if the message was sent from an approved location (e.g. the signature is valid) and that it has not been modified in transit.

LuxSci now supports DKIM for both inbound and outbound email.

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It is an extremely common and annoying practice of spammers to send you email that is from yourself or your colleagues or friends.  I.e. “forged email”.  We discuss this problem in the article: Save Yourself From “Yourself”: Stop Spam From Your Own Address.

Users of LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering service now have a new and very powerful weapon to stop this kind of spam — “SPF-enabled allow list entries”.

This feature allows you to easily receive protection from forged spam messages while at the same time ensuring that legitimate messages sent between users in your organization are not filtered or caught as spam.

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We have recently seen a significant increase in occurrences where users are getting Spam email messages that appear to come from their own address (i.e. “joe@domain.com” gets a Spam email addressed from “joe@domain.com”).  We discussed this issue tangentially in a previous posting: Bounce Back & BackScatter Spam – “Who Stole My Email Address”? However, many users wonder how this is possible, while others are concerned that their Spam filters are not catching these messages.

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Email Defense has been updated with several significant enhancements. These include an improved user interface and full support for Mozilla FireFox. Additionally, this new release includes the following significant addition:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF):

• We are adding a Sender Policy Framework classifier to the Spam detection system to help identify and block fraudulent “spoofing” emails —  those sent by Spammers using forged “From” addresses.
• For each inbound message, the SPF classifier will look up the sending domain’s Domain Naming System (DNS) record and its list of authorized IP addresses (if such are specified). Messages that carry an IP address not found on the authorized list will be given a higher ‘spam-likelihood’ score.
• By determining whether or not the relationship between the DNS record and the IP address is legitimate, Email Defense can more accurately filter out fraudulent spoofed emails. As a result, this reduces risk for end-users who might be duped by the email into divulging confidential personal information.
• LuxSci supports the addition of entries to your DNS records which will support SPF — to help make it harder for Spammers to forge email from your domain. If you would like us to add an SPF record to your DNS entries or if you would like help in determining what SPF records to add yourself, contact our support team.