Today's nugget of MDaemon wisdom comes from conversations I've had with a small number of customers reporting they're unable to send outbound email to specific recipients.
Upon closer inspection of the error in the SMTP (OUT) log, there's a message reading "SSL negotiation failed".
October, as you'll probably know, is the unofficial 'silly season' for IT gatherings in the UK.
It's around this time each year, vendors, exhibition companies and industry bodies go all out competing for the attention of the IT support companies and MSP's they'd like at their events.
It may only be labelled a point release, but version 14.5 is absolutely crammed with improvements, highlighted by the somewhat 'epic' release notes linked below.
This release sees the addition of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) support, which essentially standardises how email receivers perform email authentication using both SPF and DKIM.
Configuring any Web service to work over HTTP using SSL is a good idea.
We certainly recommend it for BackupAssist's Multi-site Manager (BAMM) and in this post I'll show you how to create an SSL certificate you can then bind this kind of service to.
If you have ever suspected that a slow performing server is down to slow access to a hard drive you may have started searching the web for a tool to help diagnose the root of the problem.
What you might not know is that Windows has a very handy built-in tool for doing just that and can provide some excellent real-time statistics.
As with a lot of new technologies the real power comes from when they are used by the masses.
Sender Policy Framework or SPF is no longer a new technology and is generally widely used to help preserve email domain reputation for large organisations, but it's as well-known about in the Small to Medium sized business end of the email market.
Spammers know this and have started to target domains that do not have valid SPF records as they can most easily be used to spoof and send spam claiming to be from valid companies. Often these types of spoofed email are used in phishing attacks to then harvest more valuable data, so the smaller companies that can adopt the use of SPF the better.
A long time ago in a galaxy far away....well....ok, just a long time ago, I learnt that in order to diagnose the email delivery problems of our customers, understanding the role of DNS would be absolutely fundamental.
Not only that, but I quickly realised the value of the 'NSlookup' DNS tool which is included within Windows.
If you've ever needed to recreate your Outlook profile, or have migrated to a new PC, you may have noticed you'll lose your auto-complete information that Outlook keeps when you send a message to a recipient email address.
