We send faxes via email. That stopped working on Apr 22, 2021.
RingCentral had informed us about Email-to-Fax Security Enhancement that they were going to perform on Apr 21, 2021. No downtime was expected. After the update, faxes sent with DKIM signatures that do not match with the domain's public DNS records will fail. If you do not use DKIM signatures with your emails, you will not see any change with your email-to-fax transactions.
We don't use DKIM. For us, no action was necessary. However, email-to-fax stopped working the following day.
Our outgoing messages have no DKIM headers:
Authentication-Results: spf=none (sender IP is x.x.x.x) smtp.helo=subdomain.domain.com; accountname.mail.onmicrosoft.com; dkim=none (message not signed)
And yet, we were impacted.
Workaround
Here's the workaround we applied. Using powershell,
Get-DkimSigningConfig
will give us the status of DKIM. Following that, we had to do
Set-DkimSigningConfig -Identity <domainname> -Enabled $false
to ask Microsoft to not use DKIM in our account even though our outgoing headers don't use DKIM. You can also view status of DKIM on O365 on https://protection.office.com/dkimv2.
This is a workaround because there is no guaranty that Microsoft will keep our setting.
Solution?
I'm sure this issue hit O365 users like us. Does RingCentral have a permanent solution so that we aren't impacted negatively by such changes? Can RingCentral work with a few diverse and trusted customers, give them some incentive and test such changes before rolling it out to a wider population?
Not an answer, but I'd get your IT to add SPF/DKIM/DMARC to your domain and DNS - it's not hard, and helps the email world.
We already have SPF on, @Joe Cache. Are you suggesting adding SPF and DKIM and DMARC or are you suggesting SPF or DKIM or DMARC?
Adding DKIM first and verifying, then adding DMARC rounds out the current security/spam reducing risk. All three should be on - and you can always configure 'soft fails' until you see that everything is going through normally.
We went from getting about 2000 spam a day into our filter, down to about 50.
Good to know how the 3 records benefited you. Thank you.
For customers of RC who used O365, email to fax broken on 4/21 when RC implemented email to fax enhancements. Prior to their enhancement, we had DKIM signature on our emails but that DKIM signature were injected by O365 with their `onmicrosoft` domain and not our company's domain. We are working with RC to understand whether they were looking at any DKIM signature or only those with our domain. In order to get email to fax flowing, we had to disable DKIM on `onmicrosoft`. Once we figure out what happened, we'll be reviewing our DNS records again.
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