DaveStork.nl

31/07/2025

Why every organization should enable DANE

Inbound DANE is now several months available in Exchange Online and Outbound DANE has already been automatically active since years. Since a few months Azure DNS also supports DNSSEC, which is a prerequisite for DANE. For those organizations that have a full Microsoft stack, there are now no longer any showstoppers implementing DANE. And I think every organization should make...

Compliance & Security/Exchange/Exchange Online/SMTP Comments: 0

12/02/2025

Exchange Online Transport Encryption: What You Need to Know from a Security Viewpoint

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is originally not secured by design, but there are many additional protocols added to improve security. One such protocol is Transport Layer Security (TLS) that encrypts the connections between mail servers aiming to prevent mail interception. This post discusses the different options with Exchange Online Transport Encryption. I warn you that some of the...

Compliance & Security/Exchange Online/SMTP Comments: 0

29/01/2025

Why Opportunistic TLS and Mail Security Need Your Attention

Opportunistic TLS is the standard configuration for mail transport security on all Message Transfer Agents (MTA) and mail servers. Sending and receiving mail servers will negotiate with each other which encryption they both are able to use. The most secure connection both parties can handle will be used. This means that mail can sent out with no encryption at all....

Compliance & Security/Exchange Online/SMTP Comments: 2

26/08/2024

Which Exchange Online incoming mail endpoints are there?

Mail is still an important communications protocol to provide and manage. One of the fundamental questions is how other organizations get their mail in your inbox. You would advertise the correct server via an MX-Record, or if you have partner connectors you give the FQDN to the other administrator. But which SMTP endpoint value do you need to use if...

Exchange/Exchange Online/SMTP Comments: 3

23/08/2024

Welcome to my new blog on DaveStork.nl!

My new blog site is on davestork.nl! Topics on IT such as Exchange, Microsoft 365 and related stuff.

Personal

12/05/2022

Ubiquiti UID and Microsoft 365: SSO with your VPN

One Identity My home network has been Ubiquiti Unifi stuff for years now and I am quite happy with their products. It didn’t fail me during numerous video conferencing calls since March 2020 (you know why…). Now that I am increasingly away from home, I do use the L2TP VPN solution more often to acces my home resources. Unfortunately, this...

Azure/Office 365 Comments: 0

26/04/2022

Exam MS-220 Exchange Online Troubleshooting list of sources

This month the beta exam MS-220: Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Online became available. This exam will provide the Microsoft 365 Certified: Exchange Online Support Engineer Specialty. Microsoft Learning announced this new certification in March. Because it’s a beta exam there is not a lot of training material or courses (yet) you can use to prepare. I’ve created a list of reference...

Certification/Exchange Comments: 0

12/10/2021

I will host an ESPC live webinar “Controlling your Enterprise Mail flow” on October 26th

I will be hosting a webinar on the 26th of October with the title “Controlling your Enterprise Mail flow”. The European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Conference (ESPC) is hosting this live event webinar. It is a topic I have frequently visited before. However, I still find organizations struggle with it. If you are an mail admin and struggling with...

Compliance/Events/SMTP Comments: 0

01/07/2021

One year at NeoNomads! Eight years as an MVP!

2020 has been a weird year for me. We sold our house and bought an apartment, moved to a different city in The Netherlands and soon after that, decided to quit my job at the same company for over 18 years. A difficult decision but a necessary one. I planned to take three months off for some travelling and self-reflection...

Personal Comments: 0

24/06/2021

I will be speaking at a WICCA online event next week!

It’s been a while, but I will be speaking at a WICCA online event next week. WICCA stands for “Women In Cybersecurity Community Association”. Their goal is “to bring infosec ladies and female security enthusiasts together to learn about exploits, hacking, incident response, forensics, the low-level stuff and make bad crypto jokes!” At their June virtual meetup, I will be...

Events/Security/SMTP Comments: 0

30/10/2020

Easily list mail DNS records via this PowerShell script

I get to investigate quite some mail environments in my work as a consultant. At a certain point you see some patterns emerging. One of those patterns is the correct configuration of mail related DNS records. It’s one of the first things I check when I must check an unfamiliar environment. I have talked about this anti-spoofing topic on numerous...

Compliance/Exchange/Office 365/Security/SMTP Comments: 5

30/09/2020

Exchange Online finally has plus addressing!

During the virtual Microsoft Ignite 2020, the Exchange Product Group announced the general availability of plus address support in Exchange Online. This has been a long request feature; I blogged about this in 2014 and Microsoft already announced it during Microsoft Ignite 2019. But now it’s here! Considering enabling Plus Addressing And if your re-read my 2014 post, you might...

Exchange/Management/Office 365/Uncategorized Comment: 1

05/08/2020

Quick tips to limit sending mail to the wrong recipient

It happened to all of us: sending a mail to the wrong recipient. Or disclosing the other recipients to each other.Let me show some quick tips that might help limit your users sending information to the wrong recipient. Embarrassing The Dutch Data Protection Agency (Dutch: Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) is responsible for the supervision of correct handing of personal data. This agency...

Compliance/Exchange/Security Comments: 0

16/07/2020

How To: Exchange Authentication Policies

There are several ways how you can protect and limit access to Exchange Online. Conditional Access, Client Access Rules, the older ActiveSync Device rules and, the topic of this post, Authentication Policies. These policies are available in Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2019 since CU2. This article will show you how to implement this. Why use Authentication Policies? Authentication Policies...

Exchange/Office 365/Security Comments: 4

30/06/2020

A new job at NeoNomads!

It’s time for a little personal update on what’s happening, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I wanted to write and post this for myself, but it might be interesting for others. It was a period of heavy soul-searching and job hunting, eventually leading me to join a new consulting company named NeoNomads as a Cloud Architect starting July...

Personal Comments: 2