Port25 Sign Up Information

Dear SparkPost Customer,

As the world’s largest email sender, Sparkpost processes trillions of email events per month. Our knowledge of email events is what powers our analytics tools like Signals, Event Webhooks, and our Events API. SparkPost’s Enrichment is a process that adds additional metadata fields to engagement events such as opens and clicks as well as unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Effective, January 18, 2020, SparkPost is reducing this enrichment period to 60 days. This change will significantly improve the performance and throughput of our data processing system in support of our mission to provide real-time data in a reliable manner. This change has no impact on the collection and reporting on IP address, GeoIP, or user agent since that is captured at the time the open and click event happens.

Enrichment adds the following metadata fields:

• campaign_id
• subject
• ip_pool & sending_ip
• rcpt_meta & rcpt_tags
• routing_domain
• sending_domain
• template_id and template_verison

Customer Impact

This change may have very little impact on your operations since approx 98% of opens and clicks are triggered by users within the first 60 days. For engagement events that are triggered from emails sent more than 60 days ago, the events will continue to be processed and be available to customers through Event Webhooks and the Events API and continue to be used in the reporting.

This change will go into effect on Monday, January 18, 2020. Your Technical Account Manager (TAM) can share more details with you on the expected percentage of engagement events that may fall out of the 60-day window.

The SparkPost Team

Dear Scott,

Pardon our mistake this morning for sending you the email with the subject line "We''ve integrated with Okta!". They say sending a mistake email is a rite of passage for all email senders, but we certainly feel bad for doing it. Please accept our apologies. The email we meant to send is below.

You've no doubt experienced the effects of the outage in Gmail this week. In addition to the impact of emails not being delivered during the downtime at Google, records were reported as hard bounces, causing a negative downstream impact. We are happy to report that the issue with hard bounce records has now been remediated. For details on the impact, actions we have taken to remediate on your behalf, and what you can do to help update your internal source systems, please see our blog post with the latest.

As always, If you have any questions or concerns please submit a support ticket or reach out to your assigned TAM or CSM.

Sincerely,

Laura Rose
VP of Customer Success
SparkPost

PRODUCT UPDATE

Dear Scott,

In our continued efforts to make email sending safe, secure and simple, we're excited to announce we have enhanced our integration with Okta. Okta is the leading provider of identity and access management. This integration will help protect and enable your employees and partners, wherever they are sending email.

Head to our documentation to enable our Okta integration and take advantage of the additional features in your current integration.

Read Documentation

Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Happy Sending!

Philippe Chetrit Director, Self Serve SparkPost

Dear Scott,

In the past few weeks, we have received multiple reports of customers getting messages from bad actors purporting to be SparkPost. Bad actors often take advantage of crisis situations by targeting people when they are distracted and out of their regular routine. 

During times like this, we can all expect to see more phishing scams -- emails disguised as coming from a trusted sender that are used to steal user credentials or other personal information.

We want to use this opportunity to remind all our users to ensure their SparkPost account is secure by following these best practices:

• Set up two-factor authentication for your SparkPost account
• Change your password regularly and use a strong password
• Consider using Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Consider using a password vault
• Rotate API keys on a periodic basis 

And, as always, be smart about reviewing emails before clicking:

• Make sure you know who the email is from
• Know the source of a link before you click - hover over a link before you click and examine the domain portion of the URL
• Be careful opening emails with suspicious attachments

Happy and safe email sending!

James Sipe VP of Compliance and IT Security SparkPost

PRODUCT UPDATE

TLS v1.1 Deprecation Notice

Dear Scott,

On September 1, 2020, SparkPost will be deprecating TLSv1.1 fallback across all of our systems. This is an older security standard for sending email and contains vulnerabilities that directly impact the integrity and security of your communications; vulnerabilities which cannot be fixed in these older implementations. 

As long as connections are made using TLSv1.2, this change will result in zero impact to your ongoing use of our service; however if connections are made using TLSv1.1, you will observe a failure to connect to API and SMTP endpoints. To ensure that there is no impact to existing processes, it is best to verify that your clients support TLSv1.2. You can verify the version of TLS that your client is using by collecting local packet captures of network traffic and inspecting which version of TLS is being used to establish a secure connection to SparkPost (handshake).

If you are using TLSv1.1, then you should take the following steps:

• If you are using proprietary code, have your in-house development team update the code to use TLSv1.2.
• If you are using 3rd party software, verify that your client supports TLSv1.2, and upgrade the client.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

James Sipe
Vice President of Compliance & IT Security
SparkPost

ACTION REQUIRED

EU-US Privacy Shield invalidation response

Hello Scott,

I am writing to give you an important update regarding data protection laws in Europe. Action on your part may be required if you process personal data of EU residents in connection with your use of SparkPost. If you are unsure whether action is required on your part, please consult your legal or privacy team.

TL;DR: EU-U.S. Privacy Shield invalidated; Standard Contractual Clauses validated; please sign the SCCs available here if you process personal data of EU residents via SparkPost; forward this email to your legal or privacy team if you are unsure whether this affects you. 

On July 16, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield data transfer framework. Privacy Shield had served as an approved adequacy mechanism to protect cross-border transfers of personal data from the EU to the US under the GDPR. Over 5,000 companies, including SparkPost, participate in Privacy Shield; many thousands more EU companies rely on Privacy Shield when transferring data to these companies - all of these companies are figuring out what to do in the wake of no clear overarching solution. It seems that any long term solution to EU-US data transfer will require political intervention.

In the meantime, the CJEU upheld the validity of Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) as an adequate data transfer mechanism, including for transfers to the US, provided additional safeguards are met. In light of this, SparkPost is making its Standard Contractual Clauses Addendum generally available for signature here (https://sparkpo.st/scc). The execution of the SCCs combined with SparkPost's existing data protection policies, such as encrypting data in transit and scrutinizing government requests for information, provide the additional protection required to transfer personal data from the EU to the US in compliance with GDPR. If your organization relied on SparkPost's Privacy Shield certification, please execute the SCCs as soon as possible. For now, SparkPost also continues to abide by both the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield framework principles.

Data privacy is an ongoing journey and there will always be progress to be made. The CJEU raised some important points on the need for data protection overseas, and specifically in the US. Our customers can be assured that we are committed to ensuring their data will continue to flow securely and lawfully through our services, and that we will continue our work to provide greater protections based on the issues raised by the CJEU.

Thank you for being a SparkPost customer. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at privacy@sparkpost.com.

Best,

Jason Soni
Data Protection Officer
SparkPost

Dear Scott,

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread and the situation evolves we have a heightened awareness at SparkPost of our responsibility to our communities.

SparkPost's top priority is to keep our employees safe, to ensure service to our customers and partners, and to do our part in preventing the spread of the virus.

SparkPost has robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans to ensure our business and the work we do for you continue to run smoothly. Our resilient and distributed infrastructure and workforce are already adept at remote work and virtual collaboration to support secure 24x7 operations in the same ways you have expected in the past. 

We also recognize the larger role we play in our communities, and are doing our part to minimize any contribution to the spread of the virus by having employees work from home, cancel large gatherings, and pause travel. This is to support the health and welfare of our employees and community while ensuring SparkPost can continue to provide service to customers during these difficult times.

Our Senior Leadership Team continues to monitor this fluid situation and will take appropriate actions as this event evolves. 

Thank you for your business,

Rich Harris CEO  SparkPost