Action required: Apply new email verification standards to third-party applications with mass mail functions

To: Employees in marketing and communications roles
Cc: Leaders, departmental assistants, administrative assistants

Effective February 1, Google and Yahoo began gradually enforcing new email verification standards for emails sent through third-party applications with mass mail functions like Mailchimp, Campaigner, Trello and Salesforce. The new Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) security standard will help verify a sender’s email address and prevent email spoofing, thereby reducing the likelihood of spam and phishing emails reaching intended targets.

Departments using these applications to send emails will need to work with their application vendor and CCS to reconfigure their accounts to meet the new security requirements.

If your department does not use a third-party tool to send emails, you do not need to take any action.

How this may impact you

Until your application’s security settings have been reconfigured, emails with 5,000+ recipients sent via third-party applications to non-TMU Gmail or Yahoo email addresses may be automatically intercepted by email systems and marked as spam. As a result, you may notice changes to your open and bounce rates when sending to these recipients until your application has been reconfigured.

As this change came into effect at the beginning of February, you may wish to assess open and bounce rates for emails sent prior to implementing a DMARC solution and determine alternative or additional strategies. Continued monitoring is also recommended as changes are being phased in.

Please note that at this time, mass emails sent to recipients with “@torontomu.ca” or former “@ryerson.ca” email addresses should continue to be delivered as normal. However, departments that primarily send mass emails to university email addresses will eventually need to work with their vendor to update their security settings.

CCS has launched a new cloudmail.torontomu.ca domain to meet email verification requirements

In response to this change, CCS has created the new cloudmail.torontomu.ca domain that applications can use to meet security requirements. Once your application’s security settings have been configured to the new domain, all emails sent via your third-party application will be sent from the @cloudmail.torontomu.ca email address.

In the coming days, we will be sharing an email with the TMU community announcing the new domain and letting them know that they will begin to receive mass emails from the @cloudmail.torontomu.ca address.

Contact CCS if you send emails through a third-party application

If you or employees in your area use a third-party application with mass mail functionalities to send emails, please contact Clara Guo, CCS’ manager of application infrastructure, at cguo@torontomu.ca for instructions on working with your vendor to meet the new security requirements.

In light of these changes, your application vendor may have recently contacted you with information about DMARC, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) email authentication methods. If so, please include this information when contacting CCS.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact the Computing and Communications Services (CCS) Help Desk via the IT Help portal, help@torontomu.ca or 416-979-5000, ext. 556806.