Applies to:
- Linux Hosting
- WordPress Hosting
Information:
As of 1st September 2016 all new Linux hosting packages will benefit from enhanced security requirements when accessing email. In practice this means that we will no longer accept non-encrypted connections to our servers. This is designed to ensure that when your username and password cross the Internet they cannot be intercepted as 'plaintext'. This makes your email accounts more secure.
In practice you will not see any difference in usage but it does mean your email client needs to support and be configured to use a secure (TLS) connection. Most modern email clients including Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird and EmClient support secure connections and indeed attempt to negotiate them by default. As part of the process of connecting securely you need to use the underlying mail server name rather than an alias such as 'mail.example.com'. This ensures that your email client can cross reference the server name with certificate used by our servers.
The enhanced security requirements are enforced for client access only. If you are sending emails to third party domains our mail servers will attempt to establish a secure connection. However, if the remote mail server does not suppport TLS our mail servers will automatically downgrade to a non-encrypted connection. This fallback is necessary as TLS is an extension to the email standards and is therefore not universally deployed. Enforcing it could result in some mail not being deliverable, therefore we fall back to non-TLS connections where needed. This is standard practice within the industry.