The MailGuard Support team has noticed an uptick in calls relating to recent changes to Gmail (Google Workspace) and Microsoft 365, which are useful for partners to be aware of when meeting with and supporting customers.
Gmail – DKIM & SPF Requirement
From November 2022, Google introduced a requirement that new senders sending email to personal Gmail accounts set up either SPF or DKIM
The change is designed to help prevent spoofing and spam, and to help reduce false positives, messages marked as spam when they are not. Google recommend that businesses set up DKIM to protect their domains from being spoofed and to ensure that outgoing mail is not classified as spam.
In its support centre (Google Workspace Admin Help), Google says that it ‘performs random checks on new sender messages to personal Gmail accounts’ to verify they're authenticated.
To help ensure messages sent to personal Gmail accounts are delivered as expected, you should set up either SPF or DKIM for your domain. Messages without at least one of these authentication methods will be rejected with a 5.7.26 error or marked as spam.
However, we recommend you always set up SPF and DKIM to protect your organization’s email and to support future authentication requirements. If you need help setting up email authentication for your organization, contact your email service provider.’
Read more here, or for further assistance, partners and customers can reach out to the MailGuard team.
Microsoft 365 email forwarding & enhanced filtering
Many company’s place restrictions on automatically forwarded email messages to external recipients (recipients outside of their organization).
Microsoft have been making changes over recent months to reduce potential data leaks. With these changes have come certain situations where emails may fail to deliver to the intended destination.
More specifically, auto-forwarding workflows being directed from Microsoft to the MailGuard outbound SMTP relay, may be affected by these changes around Outbound delivery pools.
As MailGuard has specific security controls for how our systems accept emails originating from Microsoft 365, if the emails are not forwarded in the expected manner these workflows may encounter issues.
If you do notice these issues, please contact the MailGuard Support team for assistance as some allowances can be made to assist (in addition to configuring Enhanced Filtering policies on the client tenant).
Microsoft says, ‘Email forwarding can be useful but can also pose a security risk due to the potential disclosure of information.’ Attackers might use this information to attack your organization or partners.
The following types of automatic forwarding are available in Microsoft 365:
- Users can configure Inbox rules to automatically forward messages to external senders (deliberately or because of a compromised account), and/or
- Admins can configure mailbox forwarding (also known as SMTP forwarding) to automatically forward messages to external recipients. The admin can choose whether to simply forward messages or keep copies of forwarded messages in the mailbox.
You can use outbound spam filter policies to control automatic forwarding to external recipients. Three settings are available:
- Automatic - System-controlled: This is the default setting. This setting is now the same as Off. When this setting was originally introduced, it was equivalent to On. Over time, thanks to the principles of secure by default, this setting was gradually changed to Off for all customers. For more information, see this blog post.
- On: Automatic external forwarding is allowed and not restricted.
- Off: Automatic external forwarding is disabled and will result in a non-delivery report (also known as an NDR or bounce message) to the sender.’
For more, you can read this Microsoft help article, or reach out to the MailGuard team.
Microsoft advise that automatic forwarding from on-premises email systems through Microsoft 365 will be subject to the same policy controls as cloud mailboxes in an upcoming update.
Keeping Businesses Safe and Secure
Prevention is always better than a cure, and one of the best defences is to encourage businesses to proactively boost their company’s cyber resilience levels to avoid threats landing in inboxes in the first place. The fact that a staggering 94% of malware attacks are delivered by email, makes email an extremely important vector for businesses to fortify.
No one vendor can stop all email threats, so it’s crucial to remind customers that if they are using Microsoft 365, they should also have a third-party email security specialist in place to mitigate their risk. For example, using a third-party cloud email solution like MailGuard.
MailGuard provides a range of solutions to keep businesses safe, from email filtering to email continuity and archiving solutions. Speak to your customers today to ensure they’re prepared, and get in touch with our team to discuss strengthening your customer’s Microsoft 365 security.
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