If you’re running a non-profit organisation, staying connected with your members and supporters is imperative. Often, email communication is used to galvanise new initiatives, ensure event attendance, and provide nurture and support to the various members of your community, wherever they are on their journey or however they may be connected to you.
A charity that we work with mentioned in casual conversation that a high number of emails had recently started to be bounced back; was this something that we could help with? This has been ongoing for several weeks now and they really needed to get an event update out.
We instinctively knew what the issue was – and many of us are facing it as we make heavy use of a facility not really created to be used on such an industrial scale.
‘We never thought this would happen!’
When the internet and protocols like email were initially created, they were built on the idea of sharing academic knowledge. The ideat that these systems would become so large they were connecting the world – or that they could/would be abused – wasn’t considered at inception, so security allowances were never made
Sadly, the growth in usage has been matched by the explosion in abuse of such systems, and it only continues to grow.
Over time, in a bid to respond to this burgeoning issue, new protocols have been created to layer in security – these are additional protocols that you need to enable manually, they don’t come automatically. Very few IT people have been aware of these protocols, let alone the end users.
All change – big tech were moving the furniture
In January, some large providers such as Google (gmail) and Yahoo decided to reject email unless your domain had these additional features (that no one really knew about) enabled. This resulted in people who sent out a lot of emails suddenly receiving a lot of bounce backs without understanding why.
The charity who came to us don’t have any in-house IT support, so we were able to help instead. We explained what was going on and how we could solve it. The charity gained access to the systems and Criticalis jumped on a screenshare, walking our clients through the process to enable the additional protocols for them (SPF, DKIM and DMARC).
Problem solved! The next set of emails were no longer rejected and everything was working as it should do. They are also now better protected as a charity because of this.
Criticalis: here to untangle your cyber security knots
This is just the kind of work we relish at Criticalis. We have decades of experience and a high level of technical expertise that we want to use to help organisations of all types and sizes keep themselves secure.
Because we have a good relationship, our client was able to mention this issue to us and we could quickly resolve it. A small action made a big difference to the charity’s work, ensuring they could maintain their key communication channels. They were happy – we were happy too!
We like to be able to help. We like feeling all those years of work now have a benefit for people who don’t have the easy familiarity and depth of knowledge that we have in cyber security, but still need the right protections in place. We’re problem-solvers, making the working world a little more secure, one fix at a time.
If you’d like that sort of support, get in touch.
