Why Businesses and Domain Owners Should Implement DMARC Before February 2024
Do you send email using your own domain name? If so, there is something you should know about and it may affect your ability to reach your email audience.
Starting in February of 2024, Google and Yahoo will require most email senders to use DMARC in order to send email to Google or Yahoo recipients. This means that if you want your emails to be delivered to Google or Yahoo recipients, you need to properly enable DMARC for your business email domain.
DMARC is an email authentication protocol that, together with SPF and DKIM, makes it easier to determine whether or not a given message is legitimately from the sender, and what to do if it isn’t. It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing.
By implementing DMARC, you increase the likelihood that your emails are delivered to your customers’ inboxes, and not marked as spam or rejected. This will help you maintain a good email sending reputation.
Widomaker can help you enable SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your business email domain, even if the domain is not hosted with us. We are email deployment experts. Contact us today, by telephone or email, to discuss this with an email expert!
Thanksgiving 2023 (Nov. 22-24)
Widomaker will be closing early on, Wednesday, November 22, 2023. We will be closed for Thanksgiving on, Thursday, November 23, and Friday, November 24. We will reopen on, Monday, November 27. We wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving holiday weekend!
Widomaker will soon start enforcing a new DMARC policy of “quarantine” on email from widomaker.com addresses
Dear Widomaker Users,
To further enhance email security, and comply with recently announced requirements from several large email providers, including Google and Yahoo, we are announcing an important update regarding our DMARC policy enforcement for widomaker.com and tni.net. This announcement only affects customers with an email address ending in @widomaker.com or @tni.net. There is a separate announcement concerning web and email hosting customers with their own custom domain names.
To find out what DMARC is, and how it can affect whether your email reaches the Inbox of your recipients, continue reading…
Continue reading
Design Beautiful Websites! A new self-service website builder is available for web hosting customers!
A new website builder is now available to our web hosting customers. Easily create professional websites without coding or hiring a designer. Pick a template, customize it with our drag & drop editor, and click “publish” to go live. Sitejet Builder for Plesk lets you design your own website directly from your Plesk control panel. It has all the tools you need for website building, no coding required. Contact us with any questions.
Is your hosted email domain ready for Google’s & Yahoo’s DMARC requirements?
Starting in February of 2024, Google, Yahoo, and others, will begin requiring that DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, be properly set up on your domain name, if you will be sending email, from your email domain, to them. DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, help authenticate email senders by verifying that the emails came from the domain that they claim to be from.
You can check your domain name, to see if DMARC has already been set up, by using this DMARC Check tool.
Contact us, to set up an appointment, to review your domain, and make sure DMARC is properly set up, so you don’t have trouble sending email to those providers beginning in 2024.
Temporarily disabled HTTP/2 on our Plesk hosting servers due to Rapid Reset vulnerability CVE-2023-44487
10/11/2023: 
We have temporarily disabled HTTP/2 on our Plesk web hosting servers, due to a recently disclosed vulnerability in HTTP/2. Our servers will serve web pages using HTTP/1.1 until software updates containing the necessary mitigations are provided by Plesk, and Nginx. The effect of this change from HTTP/2 to HTTP/1.1 should, at most, be a slight reduction in website performance.
11/8/2023 Update: HTTP/2 has been re-enabled based on guidance from Plesk.
FBI warns of surge in ‘phantom hacker’ scams impacting elderly
The FBI issued a public service announcement warning of a significant increase in ‘phantom hacker’ scams targeting senior citizens across the United States.
Source: FBI warns of surge in ‘phantom hacker’ scams impacting elderly
Labor Day
Our office will be closed on Monday, September 4, 2023, for Labor Day.
Home Office / Small Business Hurricane Prep
With what is (or was by now?) hurricane Idalia crossing past my house today, I decided to write a quick summary of what I usually do in cases like this to prepare. This is for a home office or a small business, assuming you have the resources for a typical home.
Source: SANS Internet Storm Center
Check if you are a victim of the Qakbot Malware!
The Justice Department today announced a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania, and Latvia to disrupt the botnet and malware known as Qakbot and take down its infrastructure. [1]
On August 29th, 2023, the FBI provided Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) with 6.43M email addresses to help notify impacted victims of their exposure to the Qakbot malware. Anyone may check to see if their email address is included in the list of victims of the Qakbot malware via the HIBP notification service.
We recommend that everyone subscribes to the free notification service provided by Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) which can notify you if your email address is found in certain data breaches, including being in the Qakbot data.
Qakbot relied on compromised accounts to spread its malicious emails. If a receiver interacted with one of these emails, it is highly likely that their device became infected. As a result, they would have become part of the Qakbot botnet. [2]
If you find that your email address is in the Qakbot data, meaning your computer was probably infected with the malware, you should take several actions, including resetting your email password, and resetting any other passwords that were used on the infected computer (banking, shopping, etc.). Also, it’s possible your computer is infected with other additional malware, it should be scanned by a reputable antivirus/anti-malware product such as Malwarebytes or Windows Defender. Since Qakbot targets, among other things, banking/financial details, you should carefully review bank statements for unauthorized transactions and report any you find to your financial institution.
Support the EFF!
