Upcoming TLS requirement for outgoing mail

An upcoming change to the SMTP/Outgoing mail server configuration may affect your ability to send out mail.  The upcoming change will require SSL/TLS connections on all outbound SMTP/outgoing mail server connections.  Up until now, our servers have required SMTP Authentication in order for you to relay out mail through our servers.  Using a secure and TLS encrypted connection was always encouraged, but was not required.  This upcoming change will make the TLS encryption a required setting.

(As a side note – TLS is the appropriate name for connecting to services securely on the Internet.  Originally this was referred to as SSL.  SSL was developed by Netscape back in the 1990s.  In 1999 the IETF organization took over the publishing of the secure standard and renamed it TLS to give it a more neutral name.  Having said all of that, you will still see applications referring to the setting as SSL, it's just a naming convention that is difficult for some companies to drop.  The last update to the actual SSL standard was nearly 20 years.  No modern application is going to be using that standard even if they still refer to it as SSL)

This is all part of a larger movement to insure that Internet connections are encrypted and secure.  This is especially true for any situation where you are passing a username and password or other sensitive information.

Most modern email clients are defaulting to secure TLS encrypted connections when you setup your email account in your email application.  I do not expect this change to affect a large percentage of our users, because chances are your email application is already using a secure TLS connection.

No other changes are required if you are affected by this.  There are no mail server hostname changes to be made or anything like that.  You simply need to instruct your email application to use a secure or TLS connection when connecting to our outgoing mail servers.

A quick look at the necessary settings to adjust if you are using Microsoft Mail as your email application is shown below:

Of course every email application is going to be a little different.  You would just need to identify and enable the necessary option in your email application.

We are working on compiling a list of affected email accounts – that we can see from the server side – that are still not using secure TLS encryption.  We will try to start sending out notices to those affected accounts next week.  Depending on just how many accounts are affected and what email applications are being used, we may create additional tutorial pages for how to update the appropriate settings for those email applications.