Security News > 2021 > August > How Does MTA-STS Improve Your Email Security?
Email routing protocols were designed in a time when cryptographic technology was at a nascent stage, and therefore security was not an important consideration.
As a result, in most email systems encryption is still opportunistic, which implies that if the opposite connection does not support TLS, it gets rolled back to an unencrypted one delivering messages in plaintext.
To mitigate SMTP security problems, MTA-STS is the recommended email authentication standard.
STARTTLS is a communication protocol extension to the SMTP email transfer protocol that allows both the communication partners to upgrade an unencrypted communication to encrypted communication.
How to Ensure TLS Encryption with MTA-STS? MTA-STS makes TLS encryption mandatory in SMTP, which ensures that messages are not sent over an unsecured connection, or delivered in plaintext.
TLS-RPT allows you to get notified of email delivery failure on TLS encrypted channels; it analyzes and reports all possible issues within those channels, allowing you to react to a TLS issue and deliver a message back without any delay.