SOAR

The conversion of all SOAR customers to the new Email List feature has been completed.

Your Email Lists will now behave similar to the original email lists you are used to. Most importantly, the Reply button will go back to the original sender of the email and NOT the Email List itself. Full details of how the new Email List feature works can be found here.

The conversion of all SOAR customers with SOAR IDs starting with [A-H] has been completed. This includes all customers with SOAR IDs starting with numbers as well.

You can view your SOAR ID at Admin/Account on your SOAR website.

You can tell what version of SOAR Email Lists your site is using by looking at Admin/Email.

• If you do not see a Convert button, you are using the new Email List feature.
• If you see a Convert button, you are using the interim Email Lists. You may convert to the new Email Lists by using that button.

Your Email Lists will now behave more similar to the original email lists you are used to. Most importantly, the Reply button will go back to the original sender of the email and NOT the Email List itself. Full details of how the new Email List feature works can be found here.

Volume Testing of the new Email List feature is going great. No delivery issues have been reported and all testing customers are very happy with the "behavior" of the new feature.

We need the volume testing to move forward more quickly though. Since turning on the Convert button on SOAR websites on 5/23, we just reached 200 Troops using the new Email List feature 2 days ago. There are just over 100 Packs using the new Email List feature as of today.

On Monday June 9th, 2014 we are going to install the new Email List feature on 500 Troop and Pack websites. This will move the volume testing to the next stage. We will be selecting the first 500 customers alphabetically by SOAR ID. You can view your SOAR ID at Admin/Account on your SOAR website.

Thank you for your patience while we found a permanent solution for the Email List feature of your SOAR website.

We do understand how vital this feature is to the communication of your unit. We also understand that a "webmail" solution while easy would NOT meet your needs. Thus we have been working hard to get you back the features you want.

We found that “mailing list software” (Mailman, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc) was all built using the email standard from a decade ago that allowed the FROM email address to have a different domain name than the delivering email server’s domain name (i.e. the mailing list software).

The new Email List feature has "behavior" that is very similar to the Email Lists you were using before the Yahoo/Gmail/AOL issue occurred.

The one big difference is the FROM address. The FROM address used to be

• <email list address> on behalf of <original sender's email address>
• Keeping the FROM address as the original sender is no longer possible as it causes email to be rejected after we "relay" it.
• Email Lists will now send all email FROM the listadm@ address on your site.
• The original sender will be placed in the TO field of the email so your members can easily see where it came from.
  

SOAR Customers,

A few of our customers have come up with a "method" that will help you better use the current configuration of Email Lists.

When a member sends an email to an Email List, have them put their own address in the TO field along with the Email List address.

TO: <Email List address>, <sender's email address>

This will accomplish a couple things:

• It will help those receiving the email identify who the email came From.
• If they use Reply All, both email addresses will show in the TO field of the reply. Then can then remove the Email List address to contact the sender directly.
  

SOAR Customers,

One of the largest website vulnerabilities in history was disclosed this week called Heart Bleed. For affected websites, someone could pull any information they wanted from an affected website without any access credentials.

More details can be found in this article.

In the first short SOAR Announcement in quite some time, we would like to announce your SOAR website is NOT affected or vulnerable to this exploit. We are not using, and have not used, the OpenSSL libraries that have this vulnerability in them. ! Your data is safe.

SOAR Customers,

The change that Yahoo made over the weekend has been creating chaos across the Internet this week. Here are some articles with more information.

• PC World
• Marketing Land
• Circle ID

Yahoo is using a technology called DMARC. Yahoo changed their DMARC policy to reject any email that does come directly from their servers. It is also telling all other email servers to do the same thing.

SOAR Customers,

Many of you have started experiencing delivery issues with your SOAR Email Lists over the weekend. We have figured out the commonality with what is going on - Yahoo yet again.

• If you send an email FROM a Yahoo email account to a SOAR Email List it will not get delivered to any of the Email List members.
• If you send an email FROM any other email domain it will not get delivered to members with Yahoo email addresses.

Why? - The Short Version

Yahoo has been plagued with receiving spam to their email accounts, being the fake sender of spam to others, and numerous counts of large numbers of hacked accounts.

SOAR Customers,

In an effort to increase communications with you, we are introducing a new SOAR News Alert feature. Our announcement emails only goes to the two primary contacts listed on your SOAR website at Admin/Control Panel/Contacts. We realize these emails sometimes end up in your SPAM folder, due to time do not get read, contact information is not current, or do they not reach all the administrators of your SOAR website. This new feature will make sure all administrators of your SOAR website are aware of important information about upcoming releases, new features, and any service outages.