Just recently, a new industry consortium made up of email providers, financial institutions, social media properties and security providers put their heads together and came up with the DMARC (Domain based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) specification.

With a goal of setting up a collaborative effort to help organizations recognize and fight spoofed emails, spam, and phishing attempts, this group is relying on the deployment of the Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys Identified Mail to complement existing anti-spam solutions.

With industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, PayPal and Bank of America already signed on, along with 11 other companies, DMARC’s work is certain to make a splash in the IT world.

To better help IT departments understand what DMARC is trying to do, and better prepare them to make a decision regarding DMARC, let’s take a little time and refresh our memory on SPF and DKIM. Continue reading Get Ready for DMARC – A Review of SPF and DKIM

Email is one of the most important communications tools for businesses. When it stops working, people start to get nervous.

While there are many things that a user can do to mess up their email, many of these problems can be resolved with a restart of the software or the computer.

However when the old standby of restarting doesn’t work, it is time for the email administrator to start looking into the issue a bit more deeply.

Here are some of the more common errors found in Outlook 2007 along with some of the ways you can make things right again: Continue reading 5 Common Outlook Errors and How to Fix Them

Over the years, Microsoft has taken its lumps when it comes to security however as a company, they have taken some pretty impressive strides to make sure that their products are more secure.

However, their security efforts have not been limited to just their products. They have launched several educational campaigns aimed at helping users better secure their computers and networks. Continue reading Email Security Best Practices from Microsoft

Not only is email the most common form of business communication, but it is also an important tool when it comes to compliance, record keeping and covering yourself.

So when a report comes out that claims that email delivery rates are 81% relying on electronic messaging for so many things can easily be called into question.

According to a study from Return Path, worldwide delivery rates for email communications hasn’t improved since 2009. The study also showed that 7 percent of all messages were classified as spam and 12 percent never reaching their destination.

For North American email users, the numbers are a bit better. An 86 percent deliverability rate is up 4 percent from the 2009 study and 6 percent are flagged as spam with 8 percent getting lost in the “mail”. Continue reading Has Your Email Lost Its Way?

If you have worked with email services for even a short time then POP, SMTP and IMAP are all acronyms that you see on a regular basis. Of course like any other technology, email is loaded with other acronyms that can easily cause bewilderment to fall across the gaze of those unfamiliar with the terms.

Acronymic jargon is used, and almost overused, in the IT field everywhere you turn. In discussions with peers, in training and especially in the various forums and blogs acronyms are used for the sake of convenience and also to make ourselves look smarter. However as one scholar once said, fluency in jargon does not equal proficiency.

But acronyms and jargon exist, and if we want to do our jobs effectively then there are some terms we need to be familiar with.

Continue reading 10 Email Acronyms Every Admin Should Know