Transitioning to new hosting

Over the last year, we’ve been changing our hosting providers with the aim of making it simpler to manage the websites and our emails.

Last year we transitioned the website away from our previous host across to WordPress. This has made it easier to have a consistent, up to date format and to make it simpler to add new pages and items.

For email, our previous provider had stopped allowing new redirects to be set up or changed, and required everyone to have a mailbox on the server. Unfortunately their webmail was not particularly useful. So on 1st March this year, we transitioned our email address hosting across to our Google Workspace account. As far as we know, this was a seamless transition, and everyone that should be receiving email still is.

Email Verifications

Along with the move to Google Workspace, we have been able to set up additional verification for outgoing emails. This verification will make sending email from our accounts and from the website more reliable, and more likely to be delivered without being marked as spam.

Additionally, having the verifications in place means that third parties attempting to send email using an @leicesterdg.org.uk address will more likely be rejected or marked as spam, reducing the likelihood of spoofing attacks being successful.

For those that understand the technical aspects, we have set up SPF and DKIM levels. DMARC is currently being rolled out as well, with BIMI under consideration.

In setting up the email verification we also realised that we had missed some configuration for the forms on the website. We think the misconfiguration, which had occurred since we moved to WordPress, had been causing some of the form submissions to be lost or marked as spam. This has now been fixed.

New Newsletter Website Address

We have also created a new subdomain for the Ringing Round Leicestershire newsletter – https://newsletter.leicesterdg.org.uk/ and a new email address – newsletter@leicesterdg.org.uk.

Mark Banner