Email Protection using SPF, DKIM, DMARC

Email Protection using SPF, DKIM, DMARC

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Tired of having your emails go into client junk / spam folders? You can increase the deliverability of your emails while protecting your brand and clients using free tools to create SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. With these free records in place, you can help block phishing, ransomware, and spam messages.

Email service providers like Gmail and Office 365 are increasingly sending unauthenticated emails to spam or rejecting them outright. This article will show you how to add an SPF, DKIM and DMARC record to your domain to help prevent this while keeping most malicious actors out. Note, this article is only intended for my personal use and comes with no guarantee of any kind.

 

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How to Bypass a Paywall

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If you come across an article or website which shows a paywall, the following website will assist you with bypassing the paywall: https://12ft.io

Alternatively, you can simply append the web address to the end of the 12ft.io URL as demonstrated below:

EXAMPLE: https://12ft.io/thewebsite.com/article-with-paywall

 

Conclusion

I hope my article on bypassing any paywall has helped you. I welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions regarding this article.

You may support my work and future improvements by sending me a tip using your Brave browser or by sending me a one time donation using your credit card.

Let me know if you found any errors within my article or if I may further assist you by answering any additional questions you may have.

 

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Stop Windows from Spying, Collecting Data

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Using a free network monitoring tool such as WireShark we can see that several discrete and background connections are made without our request when simply accessing our computers.

In this article I provide a few simple hosts file entries to help increase our privacy.

 

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How to Verify a File Hash on Windows

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To ensure that a file has not been tempered with or was corrupted during a transfer or download we can verify the checksums with tools built into Windows.

This is a crucially important for security purposes, especially if you install software from a source other than an official site. If the file has been changed it could contain malware that spies on you or takes your data hostage, for instance.

The checksum verification tool you use is also important which is why I recommend using the built in Windows PowerShell and certutil tools.

In this article I provide simple and quick Windows commands to verify MD5 and SHA256 checksums.

 

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Remove Microsoft Authenticator Greyed Out Account

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Recently used my Microsoft Authenticator to access an email address on my mobile phone which I only needed temporary access to. After which I removed the email account from Outlook on my phone only to have it remain (greyed out) within Microsoft Authenticator.

To remove the greyed out account from Microsoft Authenticator I had to go to my phones’ “Settings” then “Accounts and backup” followed by “Manage accounts“. To my surprise, even though I deleted the email address from Outlook, the email account was still there. Once I removed the email address and reloaded Microsoft Authenticator the greyed out account was gone.

Conclusion

I hope sharing my experience on how I successfully removed an unwanted, greyed out account from Microsoft Authenticator has helped you.

You may support my work by sending me a tip using your Brave browser or by sending me a one time donation using your credit card.

Let me know if you found any errors within my article or if I may further assist you by answering any additional questions you may have.

 

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Synchronize Microsoft Authenticator Between Devices

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WARNING! The instructions herein are for my own personal use to jog my memory since I keep forgetting to take my memory pills. These instructions may be wrong and may cause you to lose all of your stored two factor authentication codes. This will obviously prevent you from accessing your two factor authentication enabled accounts. Do not attempt to synchronize your Microsoft Authenticator between devices using this article. Now back to jogging my memory.

 

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Google Authenticator versus Microsoft Authenticator

Google Authenticator versus Microsoft Authenticator

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Recently switched my 80+ Two Factor Authentication Accounts application from Google Authenticator to Microsoft Authenticator on my Android phone and am very happy with the switch. It may also be worth noting that Microsoft Authenticator currently has a 4.6 star rating whereas Google Authenticator only has a 3.7 rating.

Even with that, I was reluctant to switch over. After all, I have over 80 accounts to manually port over. So I started out with only a few everyday accounts and once I obtained greater confidence I made the full conversion over.

 

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How to Disable Microsoft’s Cortana

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Microsoft has, yet again, proven it has no ability to be original or creative with their integration of a digital personal assistant, called Cortana, into Windows 10.

This new built-in feature is just as unhelpful as it is annoying. It’s like Microsoft doesn’t even use their own products. On top of that, it is yet another invasion of my privacy.

For those of us who just want to search for a file on our PC, and nothing or nowhere else, the following instructions will help you do so. This will help you turn off and disable Microsoft’s Cortana from your Windows 10 computer as well as disable the Bing search results from the Start menu.

 

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Google has Failed to NOT BE EVIL

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“Don’t be evil” was a motto originally used by Google. A lot has changed!

A former Google employee is blowing the whistle on his former employer’s business practices. The whistle blower claims that Google has created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms – in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content. This former employee has delivered roughly 950 pages of documents to the United States Department of Justice’s Antitrust division Friday, August 9th, 2019. He has also sat down with Project Veritas in a revealing interview which we highly recommend you view below.

Regardless of your political leanings, if companies are permitted to lie to the public and to congress about their business practices it opens the way for them to become malevolent. We all can agree that this would help no one and, due to their size, may hurt millions of unwitting participants.

 

 

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How to Enable DNS over HTTPS in Firefox

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Web site domain names, like endurtech.com, are simply a human friendly representation of Internet Protocol Address (IP Address). Rather than typing in or memorizing the four sets of three numbers (IP4) for Google.com, developers came up with the Domain Name Server (DNS) protocol. When you type in any domain name, this protocol looks up the associated numerical address and tells your browser where to go. Think of it as a hidden operator directing traffic on the world wide web.

The DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol works similarly to how the normal DNS protocol works. The major difference is the added privacy that it provides by encrypting your web related request and traffic. DoH takes your DNS query and sends it to a DoH-compatible DNS server via the encrypted HTTPS connection.

This way, DoH “hides” your DNS queries inside regular HTTPS encrypted traffic and bypasses the default DNS settings that exist at the operating system level. In most cases these are the ones set by your local internet service provider (ISP). What this means is that third-party “observers” won’t be able to “sniff” your web traffic and tell what DNS queries you have run and discover what web site(s) you are accessing. Best of all, the DoH protocol works at the App level as well!

Currently, only Mozilla’s Firefox browser has released instructions for enabling use of this protocol, but you’ll have to manual enable it. See instructions below on how to do just that.

 

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