ExchangeDefender Introduces Friendly Display Names

Friendly Names, Finally.

You’ve only been waiting 20 years for this feature and we’re happy to finally deliver it: ExchangeDefender will now show friendly display names and email addresses, giving you a better idea of who the email sender is.

This is a slightly technical pragraph that we encourage you to skip. Every email you receive has two From: addresses. One is a “friendly from” or “header from” address that prints the name of the sender as the user configured it inside their mail software such as Outlook or Gmail. The other is an “envelope from” or “mail from / return path from” address that is used for mailer/postmaster reasons to bounce and process messages. As an email security solution, ExchangeDefender only looks at and reports envelope addressing as the friendly from can easily be spoofed and faked and generally has no impact on the underlying SPAM filtering technology, message routing, SPF/DKIM, and a myriad of other technical reasons. Two decades ago, when ExchangeDefender was first and foremost meant to be a front line defense on the edge/perimeter before allowing traffic to get to the firewall, envelope from was what I went with.

What made sense two decades ago, which is centuries in IT terms, doesn’t make sense in 2018. Today ExchangeDefender is no longer primarily an edge security service, it is prime real estate in which end users and business employees spend a considerable amount of their time managing their mail, sending documents, sending encrypted attachments, assuring compliance, collaborating, and as such the design and the content needs to show something relevant to the user (not the IT administrator power user that is likely managing things through our powerful Domain Administrator section).

Oh, and by the way, it’s also going to show up like this in our updated SPAM Reports starting in October for our ExchangeDefender Pro subscribers:

P.S. Please tune into our new feature webinar on Wednesday, October 17th, 2018 at noon EST. Lot’s of new features are coming in ExchangeDefender as we transform the product to better serve the compliance and security needs of our clients. Register Now!