Most Facebook email notifications are now encrypted

95% of Facebook’s notification emails are now encrypted with both Perfect Forward Secrecy and strict certificate validation, Michael Adkins, a Messaging Integrity Engineer at Facebook, shared on Tuesday.

Back in May, the social network did an assessment of how many SMTP servers its productions system successfully negotiates TLS encryption with, and the results were the following:

  • 76% of unique MX hostnames that receive Facebook emails support STARTTLS, an extension that offers a way to upgrade a plain text connection to an encrypted one
  • 58% of Facebook notification emails are successfully encrypted
  • 74% of hosts that support STARTTLS also provide Perfect Forward Secrecy.

At the time, Facebook called on providers (who haven’t already) to deploy STARTTLS, and they have been pleasantly surprised by the results.

These new numbers are manly due to major providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo making the change.

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