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Posts Tagged ‘smtp’

LuxSci Joins the Oracle Cloud Marketplace

Friday, August 27th, 2021

LuxSci is pleased to announce that our Secure High Volume solution is now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace for deployment with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a centralized repository of enterprise applications offered by Oracle and Oracle partners.

luxsci oracle marketplace

LuxSci’s Secure High Volume email service allows organizations to secure their outbound transactional and marketing emails with highly flexible and secure email encryption. Users can select the method of encryption (TLS, Secure Portal Pickup, PGP, S/MIME, etc.) to meet their campaign needs. Sending emails that contain sensitive information like protected health information (PHI) is easy and secure with LuxSci’s ultra-flexible encryption technology.

LuxSci’s services are highly configurable. Each customer has their own custom deployment to meet their sending and throughput needs. Customers can choose to implement high availability services to increase sending power and reduce downtime in the event of server failure. Secure High Volume sending integrates with your existing platforms via SMTP or API to streamline secure email sending.

In spring 2021, LuxSci announced the move to Oracle’s security-first cloud infrastructure. OCI’s highly flexible and secure server configuration options allow LuxSci to deliver larger quantities of HIPAA-compliant email messages. Compared to other servers, OCI is faster and more reliable. With OCI, LuxSci can also architect more custom deployments and can serve customers of all sizes. Learn more about why LuxSci chose to work with Oracle.

 

 

Are Cloud Servers Bad for Sending Email?

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

Public cloud servers are great for many things; however, sending email is not one of them.

cloud servers bad sending email

Why Cloud Servers are Bad for Sending Email?

The main issue with public cloud based services is that you are sharing resources with their other customers. This includes IP addresses. Most organizations try to filter out bad IPs, but when joining a new service there is a chance you could be assigned an IP with a poor reputation.

The IP address spaces used by the major public cloud vendors (i.e. Amazon, Rackspace, etc.) for their cloud servers are well known and are generally black- or gray-listed by anti-spam systems. This can slow or altogether stop emails sent from those IPs to getting to inboxes. Additionally, many of the IP addresses in use by these systems are flagged from previous abusive use by spammers. When setting up a new cloud server, you could be easily assigned one of these flagged IP addresses. Even if you do not inherit a bad IP reputation from the previous user(s), your server will be listed as a public cloud IP address. As a result, it may suffer from the “bad neighborhood effect” and thus considered a possible spam source.

We have investigated several services that claim to offer “Cloud-Based Outbound Email” and have found that many use cloud servers for things like scanning email messages for spam and viruses, but use non-public cloud servers for the actual sending of email. This is obviously not true for all companies, but if everyone might be affected, the solution is to NOT send email directly from your public cloud. There are, however, straight-forward solutions to getting email originating from such servers delivered.

How Did Cloud Servers get a Bad Email Reputation?

The “utility computing” model of the cloud is to blame. In the interest of making these services as cheap as possible, there are generally very few services included. In particular, you get 1) minimal customer support, 2) little pre-sales work, and 3) minimal, if any, validation of new customers. All that time would increase prices. As a result, it is easy for a spammer to signup with a name and credit card. To start sending spam, all they need to do is agree to “terms and conditions” by checking a box. (How much do spammers care about that?)

Spammers and fraudsters take advantage of this simple workflow to setup servers for sending spam or performing other abusive actions. They do not care if they get shutdown fairly quickly because:

  • They are using stolen credentials and payment information,
  • It is so easy to setup a basic cloud server, that there is not much time lost, and
  • Even if they get shut down “fairly quickly,” they have still sent some of their spam, etc.

Once they get shut down, spammers choose another public cloud provider and use another stolen identity to do it again. They can even automate this signup process by using the available APIs for these services.

The above scenario contributes to the pollution of the reputation of IP addresses and the public cloud servers in general.

Why Private Cloud Servers Are Better for Sending Email

With physical dedicated and managed servers and private clouds, you typically interact with a sales representative, sign a contract, and undergo some level of validation (even if that happens behind the scenes). The time it takes to sign up blocks most spammers who use these services and  keeps these IP address spaces much cleaner. The more validation and attention that is offered by a sales staff before signing up their customers, the cleaner the IPs are.

If you are sending large quantities of important email from a cloud server, consider using LuxSci Secure High Volume Email Sending to avoid the risk of your emails getting blocked by spam filtering services. Using a trusted private provider will mitigate the bad neighborhood effect and significantly increase the deliverability of your email. Unlike in a public cloud, you can add additional dedicated resources to ramp up throughput for business critical emails.

Are Replies to my HIPAA-Compliant Secure Emails also Secure?

Friday, June 18th, 2021

Sending HIPAA-compliant secure emails is easy- LuxSci’s services allow you to send secure emails to anyone with an active email address. One common question is whether the replies back to these messages will also be HIPAA compliant. This is especially a concern when customers choose to use TLS only a a secure means of email delivery.

In this article we will break down the various ways that messages are sent securely from LuxSci to recipients across the Internet, and how replies behave — and whether they are secure and compliant. At the end, we provide some recommendations for best practices for maximizing data security.

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How do I fix the reputation of my IP address?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2021

It happens — you’re sending email messages without issue, and then suddenly emails are not being delivered, or they’re being flagged as spam. A little digging reveals that the problem is that your “IP reputation” is poor, and you need to fix it somehow.

improve reputation ip address

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Opportunistic TLS for SMTP

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

If you want to make sure your emails are secure and private, opportunistic TLS for SMTP won’t quite cut it. To explain why, first we have to step back a bit.

Most people don’t put a lot of thought into how their emails are sent and received, so it’s not unusual for them to think it works akin to teleportation or magic–that messages somehow just appear right in their inboxes.

While the rapid delivery speeds may seem to justify such presumptions, there are actually a bunch of steps under the hood. When you send an email, it uses a protocol called the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to make its way through to your recipient’s server. From there, your recipient uses another protocol such as ActiveSync, POP3, MAPI, or IMAP, or a Web-based interface, to pick it up and read it.

Opportunistic TLS

Unfortunately, these aren’t always secure by default. Under its original design, emails are sent as plaintext. This means that anyone along the email’s journey can see (and even change) their contents. This can include those in charge of the servers, the government, and even hackers that intercept the data.

Thankfully, engineers weren’t completely oblivious to this glaring security hole, and they have introduced a number of mechanisms that can be leveraged to protect email.

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