We are happy to announce improvements to the Remote Connectivity Analyzer CAPTCHA experience.  Several of you told us how frustrating the previous experience was to use.  And we agree… it was very annoying to have both password fields get blanked out if you got the challenge incorrect.  While we can't remove this "feature" completely, we hope the enhancements will make a big difference.

The latest version (V1.4) of the Remote Connectivity Analyzer has the following improvements:

  • We are using a new CAPTCHA service provided by an internal team!
    • The challenge is NOT case sensitive, so it doesn't matter if you type upper or lower case letters.  We also note this on the web page.
    • The CAPTCHA challenges will not include hard to distinguish letters/numbers.  For example 2 and Z or O and 0.
    • If you get the challenge wrong, the password entries will not be removed.
    • Once you enter a correct response to the challenge, you will be verified for a set amount of time.  This means you will not see additional CAPTCHA challenges until the timeout period expires.

(We can hear the cheers already!!)

A few more:

  • The inbound SMTP test now inserts the IP address of the user performing the test into the test email message. The IP is also inserted into an SMTP Header (X-Originating-IP).
  • Fixed an issue in the Sender-ID test where certain DNS responses while evaluating the "exists" mechanism were incorrectly being treated as a TempError
  • The outbound SMTP Sender-ID tests now conform to the RFC specified limit of ten DNS-based mechanisms that can be used during the evaluation of the SPF record.
  • And more! Read about it here.

Here's a fun 1 minute video which demonstrates some of these improvements.

Enjoy!

Brad, Nicole, and Shawn