DKIM

September 28, 2023 Leave a comment

DKIM. No, it’s not a new singer/rapper/influencer/whatever. It’s a DNS controlled Email Authentication mechanism. What does that mean? Well, if you want a technical explanation, go see my article on Authorization vs Authentication, since that is important to understand if you want to understand DKIM. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It uses a feature of Public Key Authentication to allow receiving mail servers to verify that the message is not modified in transit and that the sender is authentic. …

Continue Reading →

So You Want to Work in IT – Part 2 – Finding a Direction

April 1, 2022 Leave a comment

There are a lot of different ways to take a career in IT. A lot of the time, people fall into a path in their career without really realizing. I personally fell into a focus on email because I kept getting assigned to work on email systems as a primary assignment. The more I learned about email, the more my employers began to rely on me to work with Exchange server.…

Continue Reading →

Step by Step: Intune Delegation with RBAC #3

September 10, 2019 Leave a comment

< Previous |

So far, this guide has covered terminology and theory used to develop Delegated Administrator roles for Intune’s RBAC system and how to create users with limited rights to Intune in Step by Step: Intune Admin Delegation with RBAC #1
Next, we covered building RBAC scope tags and assigning those tags with device groups in Step by Step: Intune Delegation with RBAC #2
For this article, we’ll cover the creation of an actual Role in Intune.…

Continue Reading →

How Does SPF Work?

July 30, 2019 Leave a comment

No, I’m not talking about sunscreen. The SPF I’ll be discussing here is Sender Policy Framework. It’s an email security measure that can prevent unauthorized use of your email domain name. I’ll be going over a few things in this post, but if you just want to know how to craft an SPF record, you can scroll to the “The SPF Puzzle” section below.…

Continue Reading →

AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 1 – The Basics

May 30, 2019 Leave a comment

Cloud Concepts and Terminology

As a consultant who was working on Office 365 migrations shortly after it was released (well, renamed), I have worked on a log of migrations. Migrations are a always a project that can be difficult to manage if not done properly. As with any project, planning for a migration is extremely important.…

Continue Reading →

Save Sent Items in a Shared Mailbox

April 16, 2019 Leave a comment

Shared Mailboxes make it possible to centralize email for a specific group of employees. If you don’t know what a shared mailbox is, think about the “Contact Us” address most web pages have. Or your company’s “Support” mailbox. Exchange implements these very easily through mailbox delegation. Grant users full access to the mailbox in the Admin Portal and the mailbox will appear in Outlook.…

Continue Reading →

Exchange Server Maintenance Functions

April 11, 2019 Leave a comment

Exchange server maintenance requires some specific steps in 2013+. There is no specific maintenance mode, as in previous versions, but you can complete a few actions to take a server out of production. You will need to drain the SMTP queues on the server, tag the services as unavailable, then disable transport entirely. Each step needs to have some rest time, so that is built into the script.…

Continue Reading →

Fixing Outlook Certificate Errors

April 10, 2019 Leave a comment
How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.

Continue Reading →

Office 365 Migration – When Do I Need to Use Third Party Tools?

March 29, 2019 Leave a comment

This post may be late in coming, given that most smaller companies have already moved away from on-prem solutions to cloud based services for things like email and file sharing, but I feel like it’s important to stress some of the realities involved in migrating from on-prem to cloud systems. Particularly when migrating to Office 365.…

Continue Reading →