Monthly Archives: November 2023

Inbox Placement – A New View from MxToolbox

Reaching inboxes has always been essential for your business. If your latest newsletter or campaign lands in the Spam/Junk folder or is never delivered, your email efforts have failed, not to mention the wasted time/resources.

Many of our customers do not realize that they have an email delivery issue until a customer or vendor reports a missing email. There are many subtle reasons why an email can fail to reach the inbox. Getting to the Inbox now requires active management.

A Wider View

MxToolbox’s Inbox Placement is analysis tool for your campaigns. You email our list of test accounts to see where your outgoing messages will most likely go before you launch your campaigns, whether it fails entirely, makes the Inbox or gets turfed to a Spam/Junk folder. And, if an email falls short of reaching an Inbox Provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.), our service provides insight to help you make necessary changes to improve your results.

Expanded Insights

Our team of Email Delivery Experts have been analyzing the most common reason why emails fail to make the Inbox and developing new ways to surface this information to our customers. The new version of our Inbox Placement tool has some great improvements:

  • New Overview Page: Better summary information of campaigns and inbox placement analytics.
  • New MxTips with MxScore: More analysis tools to help you make the Inbox along with our weighting of importance to help you prioritize changes.
  • MxTips Types: Better insight into which MxTips were tested and their outcomes (Failed, Warning, Success). They include best practices, content, security, and reputation.
  • Email Render: See a copy of the original email for quick analysis and (coming soon) in-render highlighting of the MxTip warnings.

How Does Inbox Placement Work?

With MxToolbox’s Inbox Placement, you get ahead of many unknown email delivery issues and stay out of the dreaded Spam/Junk folder. MxToolbox Inbox Placement gives you two options to test the placement of your emails:

  1. Proactively send emails to our test inboxes – Whether you are crafting a new nurturing campaign or setting up a newsletter, send a test email copying our list of test inboxes. MxToolbox will tell you how the email performs!
  2. Monitor on-going newsletter performance – Subscribe our list of test inboxes to your newsletter lists to continually monitor performance and get warned when your reputation changes with Inbox Providers. Inbox Providers are constantly changing their algorithms to remove irrelevant email. Each time you send an email to these lists, you get insight into how they performed with the major Inbox Providers!

MxToolbox Inbox Placement provides actionable information about your email campaigns, highlights any inbox deliverability issues outlines steps for enhancing your email performance.

How Can I Get Inbox Placement?

MxToolbox Inbox Placement is a feature of MxToolbox Delivery Center. Simply purchase one of our Delivery Center plans and you gain access to Inbox Placement along with our full suite of DMARC email delivery tools.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) Fraud on the Rise

Cybercriminals are a major threat to business email. Through various business email compromise (BEC) scams, these fraudsters can cause irreparable financial and reputational damage to your company. With BEC on the rise, protecting your inbound (and outbound) messages is vital to your company’s success and longevity of its brand.

What Is Business Email Compromise (BEC)?

BEC attacks are financial in nature and target organizations of all sizes. The gist of a BEC scam is a fraudster pretends to be someone at the executive level, then convinces an unsuspecting employee to help them wire funds outside of the company. BEC compromises often use publicly available information, phone calls and emails from domains that are similar in nature to the target company. For example: targeting MxToolbox.com with an email from MxTooŀbox.com. Look closely.

Loss numbers are frequently significant, and it’s a very appealing tactic for scammers looking to get rich quick.

Unreported BEC (Needed?)

Many instances of BEC fraud go unreported because few companies want to admit that they fell victim to a scam. As a result, cases are typically hidden until court proceedings. It’s difficult to gauge how much money is actually lost to BEC scams per year, but the estimates are astronomical.

Common Types of BEC Attacks

According to the FBI, there are five common types of BEC scams:

Email Account Compromise

In an email account compromise attack, an employee’s email account is hacked and used to request payments from vendors. The money is then sent to attacker-controlled bank accounts.

Vendor Email Compromise

Companies with foreign suppliers are common targets of vendor email compromise. Attackers pose as suppliers, request payment for a fake invoice, then transfer the money to a fraudulent account.

CEO Fraud

Scammers impersonate the CEO or executive of a company. As the CEO, they request that an employee within the accounting or finance department transfer funds to an attacker-controlled account.

Lawyer Impersonation

Fraudsters pose as a lawyer or legal representative, often via email. The common targets of these attacks are lower-level employees who might not have the knowledge or experience to question the validity of an urgent legal request.

Data Theft

Data theft attacks typically target HR personnel to obtain personal information about a company’s CEO or other high-ranking executives through emails. The attackers can then use the received data in other future attacks, such as CEO fraud.

Tips to Avoid BEC Scams

Because email is such a critical aspect of your business, a single compromised account is all it takes to financially damage your company and its brand. Here are some tips on how to stay protected and secure:

  • Carefully scrutinize all emails. Be wary of irregular emails that are sent from C-suite executives, as they are used to trick employees into acting with urgency. Review emails that request transfer of funds to determine if the requests are irregular.
  • Educate and train staff. While employees are a company’s biggest asset, they’re also usually its weakest link when it comes to security. Commit to training them according to the company’s best practices. Remind all that adhering to company policies is one thing, but developing good security habits is another.
  • Confirm any changes in vendor payment location by using a secondary sign-off by company personnel.
  • Stay updated on your customers’ habits, including the details and reasons behind payments.
  • Verify requests for transfer of funds when using phone verification as part of two-factor authentication.
  • If you suspect that you’ve been targeted by a BEC email, immediately report the incident to law enforcement or file a complaint.

How Can MxToolbox Help? (DMARC)

DMARC helps secure your company’s email platform and fights to protect against BEC scams. By implementing DMARC checks on inbound email and educating employees, the prevalence of online fraudsters and their BEC cons can be minimized. In addition, Implementing DMARC on outbound email will reduce of your brand being used in a BEC scam, potentially damaging your business reputation.

At MxToolbox, our email experts have created several tools and services to safeguard your business and increase its email deliverability. Check out our various products to help protect your company’s email reputation.

Our Commitment to Free Tools

MxToolbox started out as a simple set of free tools for IT and Email administrators. Most of our customers used our original DNS, MX and Blacklist lookups to verify their website and email setup and understand why email wasn’t going through. Since those days, we’ve committed to continually adding useful free tools to help IT and Email professionals with their daily tasks. From A record (and AAAA record) lookups to Whois Lookup, we have you covered (and if there is a tool we’re missing, we encourage you to let us know).

Not only do we have a comprehensive list of tools, we continue to expand it: when we find a tool we need, we add it to the list. For example, we recently added the:

MTA-STS Lookup: This test checks a domain or hostname for an MTA-Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) DNS TXT record and also for a valid MTA-STS policy.

Organize your MxToolbox Tools

We understand that not all our tools are for everyone, and that you use different groups of tools for different tasks: email, security, setup, etc. For your convenience, we organized our tools into categories:

  • All Tools: Every available free tool is housed under this tab.
  • Email: For email problems, this tab is your best bet
  • Network: To address potential network issues, try these tools.
  • Website: If you have any website queries, this tab provides answers.
  • DNS: You can find all tools related to DNS here.
  • New: This tab shows the most recent additions to our expanding toolbox.
  • My Favorite Tools: Your customized favorites list. For more information, see the corresponding section below. Learn how to setup your favorites

For a complete list of our free tools, click here. We always enjoy questions/feedback, so let us know about your MxToolbox tools experience. Be sure to use our tools to improve your email delivery rates!