Ideas, News and Announcements!Greetings and Happy Spring from studio x. With the welcome spring air lifting spirits, this is a great time to freshen your website with recommended updates and budding ideas that will give you and your customers a confident and secure experience. We've highlighted a few of them below to get you started and we'll be sending more throughout the year.
ADA Compliance - The American Disabilities Act (ADA) has implications with respect to websites. Tools have been created over the past several years to help make it easier to make a website ADA Compliant. Again, we encourage you to reach out to your webmaster or to us to do a review of your site and implement the necessary changes. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - SSL is what allows a website to operate at https instead of http. Https connections are secure (while http is not). Https protects the communications between your customer and your website by encrypting and decrypting the requests to and from the server. Search engines also continue to favor secure websites in their results over websites that don't run securely. While we don't require that you upgrade your website to SSL, we strongly encourage SSL and we no longer build websites without them. There's a minimal cost increase of $5/month, which includes all maintenance and renewals (several are needed per year) as well as SPF records, DKIM keys and DMARC records (see below).
The primary issue to date has been communicating the ease of this process and reassuring everyone that there will be no downtime or emails lost during the migration process. Important differences to note. Disk Space and Mobile Friendly Roundcube Over the coming months, we will continue reaching out to those of you who have hosted email with us. At that time, we will provide you with specific and detailed instructions for completing the migration of your email accounts and we will have staff available to help should you require assistance. Trash and Spam Auto-Deletion The Trash folder will automatically delete items after 7 days in Trash. While there is a short window of time after deletion where they can be recovered, we strongly recommend that you do not put emails in Trash or Spam unless you are comfortable with them being permanently deleted.
Check out the free online service from Spamcop at www.spamcop.net. With this service, you can register your email address and report spam as it arrives. The service allows you to paste the source of an offending email into the Spamcop system. Once submitted, Spamcop provides a detailed analysis along with the options for privately reporting the email as spam to the offending network administrator AND this often has the wonderful side effect of getting your email off the given spam list! Additionally, Spamcop aggregates all user reports into a succinct Real-time Blacklist Service which we then use to identify new spam. Most email programs already provide the ability to view the raw source code of an email so that it can be copied and pasted into a service like spamcop. We provide a list here along with screenshots for the most common email programs and how to find or view the raw source code of an email. If your email program is not on the list, use your favorite search engine and search for "view full email headers in X" where X is the name of your email program.
SPF Records tell the world what email systems are allowed to send email from your domain. Example: The SPF records for studio x specify that emails can be sent by the same server we host our website on, as well as by the mailchimp newsletter servers. Without SPF records specifying mailchimp servers as permitted sending systems, emails sent from that system are supposed to be rejected, or they should at least get a higher spam score. We added mailchimp to our SPF records so that we can send newsletters from Mailchimp. We did not add Constant Contact or any other provider because we don't use them, so any emails sent from those systems claiming to be from anyone[at]studiox.com should be rejected. DKIM Keys are similar to SPF records, DKIM keys have to be set up and installed. Once installed, DKIM keys act like a signature of the email being sent. It allows the receiver to check that an email was indeed sent and authorized by the server claiming to send the email. If the server that sends the email is unable to authenticate the signature, the receiver can be well assured that the email is very likely spam, or that the given server is not properly configured to send the email in question. Both SPF records and DKIM keys work well to validate the sender of the email and the system that sent it. Together they provide a high level of assurance that the email was in fact sent by the person saying they sent the email. The only thing SPF and DKIM keys can't stop is mail sent from an account that was broken into. Those accounts are the holy grail for spammers and the best way to stop that from happening is using a long and strong password.
If you have any questions or would like to see a topic discussed in future mailings, drop us an email and let us know what it is. And, as always, if you or someone you know is looking for a website re-design or update, please reach out to us - we have the skills, expertise and love to make it happen! The studio x team,
Kyle, Jay, Jasmine, Roxanne and Jim. |
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