Aug. 24, 2023 – The State Bar of Wisconsin has recently made changes to its email security to better protect against spam, fraud, and phishing attempts.

Each email received by the State Bar is examined to make sure that the incoming email is being sent from a recognized and valid source.

For those that do not appear to originate from a recognized and valid source, it may mean emails that are rejected or delayed in their delivery.

That creates issues for both our internal State Bar users seeking to exchange important and timely information with you and for those of you on the other end.

To ensure the successful transmission of emails to State Bar email addresses, users sending emails to the State Bar email must update email security settings on their end.

Delays and Rejections

Since this email security change has been implemented, incoming messages from some individuals and organizations are being quarantined as fraudulent.

This is happening because some email system configurations on the email sender’s end may not be set correctly. That is, they do not include enough information to email service providers to be recognized as coming from a valid source.

To assist you and your organization, and in turn the State Bar in promoting successful message delivery, please share this information with your IT staff to investigate if your organization may have issues sending messages to the State Bar and possibly others.

Updating Security Settings

To aid you and your IT staff in this evaluation, MXToolbox (https://mxtoolbox.com) provides several tools to assist in validating email configuration.

An email can also be sent to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com to receive a quick summary of the settings. If everything is configured as expected, you should see a section showing green status checks (see Figure 1, below) in the response. If not, these tools will help your IT staff to identify potential configuration issues.

Figure 1. When you send an email to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com, you'll receive a quick summary of your settings. In this example, the response indicates green status checks.