Are Your Messages Being Transmitted Securely?

If you are not certain that your messages are being securely transmitted to the SocketLabs platform, then today is a great day to review your current configurations.  We’ve launched additional options, features, and security to the encryption behind the SocketLabs SMTP gateway.  With these great enhancements in place we are calling for all SocketLabs customers to review their settings to ensure they are using SSL/TLS encryption.

It was almost two years ago that I wrote a blog article discussing how we were securing and protecting the privacy of your email messages with SSL/TLS. In the two years since the article’s publication, the push for email encryption hasn’t lost any steam. Strong encouragement by organizations like Google have helped drive wide spread adoption. This video from John Rae-Grant, the Lead Product Manager at Gmail, which was released shortly after our original blog post, highlights the desire to move towards encryption.

As a result of this publicity, since 2014 numerous large scale mailbox providers deployed support for encryption. Ultimately our platform is in control over the use of encryption during the final leg of delivery to the recipient. Because of this we have been able to dramatically increase the rate at which transmissions from the SocketLabs network to recipient mail systems have used encryption.

We are proud to continue moving forward the pursuit of additional encryption and security for the billions of messages we process on behalf of our customers. This week we released an upgrade to the SocketLabs SMTP gateway; this is where our customers connect to provide us messages for delivery. The upgrade includes additional encryption options and expanded support for securing message transmission. The improvements should lead to reduced configuration issues in third-party and custom developed applications trying to utilize explicit SSL/TLS via STARTTLS.

To take advantage of these upgrades and improvements for encryption, customers may need to make changes to their SMTP settings. We recommend that all customers review the settings of their SMTP connections to SocketLabs and (regardless of the configured port) if the use of SSL/TLS is not enabled, we recommend turning it on at this time. More specific information about the support of SSL/TLS with our SMTP gateway is available in our knowledgebase article.

If you encounter issues with updating your configurations, or have additional questions about SSL/TLS and the secure transmission of email, please contact our team of email experts.

To ensure that your MTA-STS is correctly configured, you can now use Socketlabs’ free MTA-STS Verification Tool. Try it for free today to protect your server’s security.