Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) is a standard that enables the encryption of messages being sent between two mail servers. It specifies to sending servers that emails can only be sent over a Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypted connection which prevents emails from being intercepted by cybercriminals.

For receiving domains to enable MTA-STS, they must announce that they support MTA-STS in their DNS and publish a policy configuration file on their website. This lets the sending mail servers (that support MTA-STS) know that they should only use TLS (1.2 or higher) connections when sending emails to the receiving domain’s mail servers. MTA-STS requires the use of STARTTLS (a protocol that tells an email server that an email client wants to upgrade from an insecure to a secure connection) for messages to successfully be sent and received.

MTA-STS also lists what the MX records for the domain are therefore preventing DNS query interception where a malicious party could redirect to another MX record. If a sending mail server does not perform MTA-STS validations, emails will still be delivered as normal, and TLS will be used if the sending mail server chooses to use it. 

Activating MTA-STS must be done carefully to mitigate blocking emails from being delivered. To avoid this risk, MTA-STS should first be deployed in testing mode, allowing time for TLS reports to provide insight into any errors that need fixing before progressing to the final enforce stage. At this stage, the use of TLS is enforced, and MTAs that support MTA-STS will only deliver email over an encrypted and authenticated connection. TLS reporting (TLS-RPT) is then needed to notify domain owners when delivery fails due to TLS issues.

How do we know that sending MTAs is failing MTA-STS? Much like DMARC, the answer is emailed reports. Enter SMTP TLS reporting (or TLS-RPT for short). It enables reporting of TLS connectivity problems experienced by the sending MTAs and is defined in RFC8460. These reports include detected MTA-STS policies, traffic statistics, successful and unsuccessful connections, and failure reasons. 

When you enable TLS-RPT, you will receive daily reports highlighting any emails that were sent without a secure connection and failed to be sent to you. Only with this insight can you identify and fix the issues within your mail server and ensure your inbound mail is not being blocked.

This sub-chapter will show you how to deploy MTA-STS and TLS-RPT on your own. 

Deploying MTA-STS is relatively straightforward once you understand the components involved. Here’s an overview of what we’ll cover:

1. Draft and publish the policy on a public, secured web server
2. Enable SMTP TLS-RPT via a TXT record
3. Signal MTA-STS support via a TXT record

Before you start the deployment, if you manage your own email server, make sure your MX records accept inbound TLS connections (according to Google’s Transparency report, about 90% of servers currently do), make sure the servers in your MX records use TLS version 1.2 or later, and that the MX server TLS certificates:

• Match the domain name used by the inbound mail server (the server in your MX records)
• Are signed and trusted by a root certificate authority
• Are not expired

These last three go hand in hand and are very likely already managed by your email host. You should only have to worry about them if you host your own mail server; if you use a third-party hosted service like G Suite, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, etc, these steps are already done for you.

Now, to start the deployment, we will proceed to draft the policy. The policy itself is pretty straightforward; here’s a sample policy:

version: STSv1
mode: testing
mx: aspmx.l.google.com
mx: alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
mx: alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
mx: *.googlemail.com
max_age: 604800

The important bits are mode, mx and max_age, as version will (for now) always be the same.

Mode can be none, testing or enforce.

• none disables MTA-STS
• testing tells external servers sending to you to evaluate the policy, and requests reports (via TLS-RPT), but does not enforce connection security required by MTA-STS.
• enforce tells external servers to verify they’re connecting to an MX listed in the policy, and that the SMTP connection is both encrypted (using TLS) and authenticated (that the server has a valid, signed certificate).

If the connection is not both encrypted and authenticated:

• Servers that support MTA-STS will not send mail to your domain.
• Servers that don’t support MTA-STS continue to send messages to your domain over SMTP connections as they normally do, but they may not be encrypted.

We recommend keeping the policy in testing mode for at least a month. That way you can get familiar with MTA-STS and fix any issues that may be brought up by the STS reports, if any.

mx lists the MX records that serve email for the domain. In almost all cases, it’s the same records you already have published in your DNS.

To specify servers that match a naming pattern, use a wildcard. The wildcard character replaces one leftmost label only, for example .domain.com or .mail.domain.com.

max_age is the amount of time the sending MTA will cache the policy. The RFC suggests a value of 1 or 2 weeks (between 604800 and 1209600 seconds), but it can be anything.

Now that we have the policy drafted, we need to publish it. The policy has to be uploaded to a public-facing web server and it must be served over HTTPS with a signed, trusted certificate (eg: Let’s Encrypt).

• Add a subdomain to your domain in the form of mta-sts.domain.com and point it to the web server
• Create a directory named .well-known.well-known in the subdomain.
• Upload the policy file you created to the .well-known.well-known directory with mta-sts.txtmta-sts.txt as the file name.

Your policy should be available at https://mta-sts.domain.com/.well-known/mta-sts.txt

Now, the last step consists of adding two DNS records: one for TLS-RPT and one to signify that you support MTA-STS and they’re both simple TXT records.

Let’s start with TLS-RPT. To receive reports you will need a mailbox where you will receive them, or you can point them to your OnDMARC address (the same as for your DMARC record) and we'll parse and display them for you.

The first TXT record should be added like this:

smtp.tls.example.com. 900 IN TXT "v=TLSRPTv1; rua=mailto:tlsrpt@example.com"

Host: smtp.smtp.tls

TTL: 900 (or your default value)

Value: v=TLSRPTv1; rua=mailto:tlsrpt@example.com

Lastly, we need to publicize our support for MTA-STS. The TXT record should be added as follows:

_mta-sts.example.com. 900 IN TXT "v=STSv1; id=1575556993"

Host: _mta-sts (note the underscore at the beginning)

TTL: 900 (or your default value)

Value: v=STSv1; id=1575556993

Update the id to a new value every time you change your MTA-STS policy. External servers use the id value to determine when your policy changes. We usually use the epoch timestamp for the id value, it’s unique enough and lets you know when was the last time it was changed.

And that’s it! You’ve enabled both MTA-STS and TLS-RPT, and you’re on your way to supporting secure, un-tampered SMTP transmissions. 

Much like DMARC, the answer is in emailed reports. These reports include detected MTA-STS policies, traffic statistics, unsuccessful connections, and failure reasons.

Enter SMTP TLS Reporting (or TLS-RPT for short). It enables reporting of TLS connectivity problems experienced by the sending MTA’s and is defined in RFC8460.

The short answer is yes. With Red Sift OnDMARC’s MTA-STS feature, you don’t need to worry about complex deployment. Simply add the MTA-STS Smart Records OnDMARC provides to your DNS and we do all the hard work for you such as hosting the MTA-STS policy file, maintaining the SSL certificate, and flagging any policy violation through the TLS report.

Once MTA-STS has been enabled, you can use OnDMARC’s TLS Reports to gain clear insight into the volume of emails received over a given period and how many of them have experienced domain successes and failures. You can easily uncover more details about a specific domain’s success or failure, such as a missing or expired certificate. This granularity tells you exactly what needs fixing for you to progress to an MTA-STS enforce mode and fully secure your inbound emails.