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IT & Security
Intelligence.

Practical guidance on managed IT, cybersecurity, network engineering, and unified communications for businesses across industries.

234 articles published
234 articles
Managed IT

Shared Mailbox, Distribution List, or Microsoft 365 Group?

Every company builds info@ or support@ wrong at least once, and the bill arrives years later during an offboarding or an audit. Here is what each Microsoft 365 object actually is, the 50 GB licensing rule that surprises people, and who an auditor can name when several people share one address.

2026-09-28 · 12 min readRead →
Managed IT

Scan to Email Stopped Working: The SMTP AUTH Change and 3 Fixes

The copier scanned to email for six years, then stopped. The cause is usually a Microsoft 365 authentication change, not a broken scanner. Exchange Online supports three sending methods for devices, and each one breaks differently. Here is how they compare.

2026-09-25 · 11 min readRead →
Managed IT

Break-Glass Accounts: When Conditional Access Locks Everyone Out

A Conditional Access policy scoped to All Users takes effect quietly, then locks out every administrator when the last session expires. Here is how Microsoft's emergency access accounts actually work, why report-only mode never tests the exclusion, and what changed in 2026.

2026-09-24 · 11 min readRead →
Telecom

Why Your Business Calls Show Up as Spam Likely, and What Fixes It

Six weeks after a cloud phone cutover, answer rates halve and the main line arrives as Spam Likely. Forty-three percent of spam traffic already carries top-grade attestation, so authentication alone is not the fix. Here is how attestation, analytics, and reputation scoring actually interact.

2026-09-22 · 9 min readRead →
Cybersecurity

The SPF Ten-Lookup Limit: How One SaaS Tool Breaks Your Mail

Adding one include can push an SPF record past ten DNS lookups, and RFC 7208 requires receivers to return permerror. The record still looks valid to the eye and to many checkers, the failure moves between senders, and under a DMARC policy of reject the message rides entirely on DKIM.

2026-09-21 · 13 min readRead →
Networking

MTA-STS and TLS-RPT: The DNS Records Almost Nobody Publishes

Only 0.7 percent of the top million domains publish an MTA-STS policy, and about one in five of those are broken. Here is how STARTTLS silently falls back to plaintext, what the _mta-sts and _smtp._tls records actually do, and the caching trap that quietly breaks both.

2026-09-18 · 12 min readRead →
Industry Trends

BIMI: What It Actually Takes to Put Your Logo in the Inbox

Publishing a BIMI record takes five minutes. Getting a logo to actually render takes DMARC at enforcement, an SVG in the Tiny P/S profile, and a mark certificate that costs roughly $1,400 to $1,500 a year. Here is what each piece requires, and why a broken record never throws an error.

2026-09-17 · 11 min readRead →
Cybersecurity

Moving DMARC From p=none to p=reject Without Losing Mail

Most domains publish p=none, which detects spoofing but blocks none of it. This walks the staged path to enforcement: what the removed pct tag actually did, why aligned DKIM is what saves forwarded mail, and a readiness test to run before you change the record.

2026-09-16 · 15 min readRead →
Cybersecurity

How to Actually Read a DMARC Aggregate Report

You turned DMARC on and the zipped XML started arriving daily. This walks the report structure field by field, shows how to tell a real spoof from a broken SaaS sender or a forwarder that kept DKIM, and explains why zero failures is a narrower claim than it looks.

2026-09-15 · 9 min readRead →
Managed IT

The October Bill

You added 360 seats in March. The annual term you added them to does not care that the season ended in October, and neither do the accounts, the offline card cap, or the access points.

2026-08-13 · 11 min readRead →
Networking

The Camera Vendor Asked for a Port Forward

A port forward to a recorder is the fastest way to give an integrator remote support, and the fastest way to put your camera system on the public internet. There are better answers, and harder questions nobody writes down.

2026-08-12 · 10 min readRead →