Alinto AG has decided to transfer most of its services in Switzerland to SEPPMAIL AG. Alinto AG partners and customers for antispam (“Cleanmail”), sign and encrypt, mail archiving and Exchange in Cloud services will be served by SEPPMAIL in the future. Alinto and SEPPMAIL are convinced that it is in the best interest of their swiss partners and customers to provide them with fully secure e-mail services now and in the future, with a strong and long-standing local presence. The transaction starting in December is scheduled to be finalized by Q2 2026.

In the future, Alinto will operate core strategic functions and serve all markets from France (Lyon), focussing on Open-Source based secured Email services (Sogomail and SOGo). As part of that strategic shift, Alinto retains some swiss key customers using Sogomail services, still operated in Switzerland.

SEPPMAIL is committed to provide a stable and ongoing service for the swiss-based partners and customers of Alinto, incorporating them into the seppmail.cloud service. Key staff of Alinto Switzerland will become SEPPMAIL employees as of December 2025.

Support requests concerning current Alinto customers and services, and any questions regarding the upcoming migration should be addressed to support@seppmail.ch.

SEPPMAIL will contact the partners and customers about next steps in the coming weeks by e-mail and through webinars to handle technical and administrative steps for the transfer starting in late December 2025.

DKIM stands for “DomainKeys Identified E-Mail“. Let’s imagine we implement DKIM in letter mail. It would look something like this.

You receive a letter with a sender’s address on it. Since you have received many letters with unsolicited or dangerous content in the past, you want to make sure that the letter is certainly from the sender indicated on the envelope and not a deception from a criminal who wants to do you harm.

The acceptance of the letter takes place at the front door, the person to whom the letter is finally to be delivered is in the house and is waiting for you to handle the acceptance of the letter.

You take the letter from the delivery person. The envelope is not sealed.

Therefore, you open the letter first (the deliverer is still standing at the front door, waiting patiently). Since the letter is secured with DKIM, you will find the subject, text and attachments, which we will simply call “contents” for this example, and another small sealed envelope in the opened envelope.

You now send the entire “content” through your personal DKIM hash machine (let’s say this is a free app on your phone) by photographing the content. The result of this effort is a combination of numbers, e.g. 4711, which could be described as a fingerprint of the content.

You now look at the seal of the small envelope and send a photo of it to the website of the “central registration register for senders” (DNS). The stamp of the seal (the domain signature) is thus matched with the fingerprint that is available in the population register. If the message register gives a positive feedback to this check, you break the seal and find a number in it as well (the hash value of the content). You now compare the fingerprint you have calculated with the one in the envelope. If this also matches, you know the following:

– The sending server “hashed” the content and added its seal.

– Since the seal was unbroken and matches the one in the message register, the sender is correct.

– Since the hashed content was identical to the hash value from you, the content was not changed along the way. Now you can accept the letter and give it to the person to whom the letter is addressed. If either value does not match, you return the letter to the deliverer and refuse to accept it.

 

Advantage of the method:

– The sending system can be uniquely identified.

– It can be checked if the content remained unchanged along the way.

 

Disadvantages of the method:

– What happens to a message if the sender does not use DKIM? You would receive a letter that can be modified by anyone along the way and the sender does not bother to sign it using DKIM. But the letter could still be authentic and have integrity, what to do, accept or deny?

– What happens to a message if the recipient does not use DKIM? Then the method was used for nothing. The recipient will still accept any letter, those with and those without DKIM signature.

– The person who sends the mail (sender) can’t force DKIM and doesn’t know that it was in use.

– The person who receives the mail (recipient) cannot see if DKIM was in use. At the front door the DKIM check was done, but this information is not shown to the receiving person.

 

 

When Stefan Klein had the idea of giving everyone access to secure e-mail communication by developing software for email encryption in 2001, a groundbreaking project was launched through the start-up business Onaras.

Following the revolutionary GINA method, which enables spontaneous encrypted email communication, 2008 saw the launch of the Swiss company SEPPMAIL (which stands for Secure E-Mail PGP Proxy Mail), which is now well-known throughout the world of IT.

Ever since, SEPPMAIL has been building on the free-of-charge possibility for the secure exchange of information throughout the DACH region and beyond.

2015: expansion into Germany

In 2015, SEPPMAIL Deutschland GmbH was founded. In 2016 we opened a support and development office in Leipzig, which was followed by the opening of our sales office in Aschaffenburg in October 2021. The German business has been operating autonomously from the start, and directly serves customers and partners in the entire German region.

We chipped away meticulously on the expansion of our services until we launched the SEPPMAIL.cloud, with its revolutionary spam filter, in 2021.

We were pleased with the enthusiastic welcome it received on the market, although we weren’t surprised, to be honest. After all, it was the logical next step forward.

SEPPMAIL counteracts a lack of resources

n the past two years, many companies have suffered from a general lack of resources. On the one hand, there is a lack of staff, while on the other hand, the existing staff have almost no free capacities available.

For this reason, businesses are increasingly moving standard solutions to the cloud. The advantages are clear: no physical resources, such as hardware or virtual capacity, are required. There is therefore no need to manage such resources.

The cloud operation ensures a high degree of availability. The remaining management is provided by a central dashboard, through which all the services can be managed in both a central and straightforward manner.

And because cloud solutions are also relatively inexpensive and far more flexible, they are also becoming increasingly popular among smaller companies.

Cloud specialists with ten years’ experience

Surveys have shown that up to 80 percent of systems integrators now work with cloud consulting in their everyday business.

And we are fortunate to have been able to bring a group of highly experienced cloud specialists on board. Our specialists have been developing and maintaining a premium email filter service for ten years. In this area, we seized our opportunities, and now, one year later, we can demonstrate with impressive figures how we have successfully made our way into the Champions League starting from zero.

“Human-centered security” is the strategy of putting people at the heart of cyber security. After all, too many attacks still take place through people. Self-detection capabilities of, for example, CxO Fraud (email forgery- sender/content), are an important tool in the fight against cybercrime – after all, an estimated 95% of all attacks start with an email.

Unsigned emails may have been sent by fake senders or their content may have been altered on their journey to you – with the deliberate intent to defraud. Many organizations are therefore finding it increasingly important to add a signature to their external emails in order to protect their communications partners.

Advantages of the certificate-based external email signature

When you receive a certificate-based, signed email, you can be certain that the sender has been verified by a third party and that the contents of the email have not been changed on its journey.

For this purpose, companies are using solutions with central certificate management, such as SEPPMAIL Appliance or SEPPMAIL.cloud. Integrating this technology is easy, and the administrative workload is pretty much zero. Once signed emails have become established, users quickly come to the view that signed emails are “good” and that unsigned emails are “bad”.

With the advantages that apply to all the external communication partners, the idea of signing emails internally using certificates is frequently being discussed as well.

Companies which have gone down this path create a number of problems for themselves, which we have summarized here:

For an internal signature, emails have to be sent via a central solution or make use of the patchy solution of client-based certificates. The management of client-based certificates is associated with a considerable workload and with errors during the decentralized management on the client machines, so we strongly advise against it.

The more complicated flow of emails makes its operation (collisions with other email flow rules, etc.), the traceability of the email routing, the troubleshooting (bounces, email routing problem analysis, spoofing protection, etc.) and the support far more challenging.

Ergo: many of the supposed advantages of the internal signature are associated with disadvantages, which is why we recommend only signing external emails.

SEPPMAIL recommends user training and an external signature

Here are some “best practices” of successful implementations which make both external and internal emails more secure.

Give your emails the trust status they deserve and further enhance the reputation of your business communications with an external certificate-based email signature. Your external communication partners (i.e. customers, partners, suppliers, etc.) will be sure to appreciate it.

Your users should be able to distinguish clearly between an email which is from the outside and one which came from inside your organization. In this way, you will be able to effectively prevent phishing attacks with what is known as a “subject tag”.
A subject tag is a text which a central component adds to the subject line of the email on its journey to your internal mailbox. The subject tag is something that cyber criminals are unable to influence.

All emails that arrive from outside should be marked with the subject tag [External]. Therefore, if an email apparently from an internal employee is marked with [External] in its subject line, it is an attack that you can easily recognize as such.

Train your users to recognize a certificate-based signature and to understand its meaning (authenticity and integrity).

An email from the outside which has a valid signature is certain to be from the sender and has not been altered on its journey to you.

As digital signatures become more prevalent in email communications, it is important to think about these things – and to establish “best practices”.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at any time here.

Every second, several new websites are created worldwide, and every twenty seconds, a phishing page goes online that wants to get hold of your data – if you allow it to. There are currently two billion websites in existence, of which just 200 million are active, though.

The other ones are used by fraudsters to generate more than a million phishing attacks per year, 27% of which are targeted exclusively at the financial sector. The thing that banks have in common with Uber and the automotive industry – which is increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals – are the methods of attack.

For a long time, hackers haven’t just been launching attacks by email, they have also been doing so with the help of social engineering – and focusing on six factors:

• Diversion
• Social standards
• Group dynamics
• Deception
• Need and greed
• Stress

This illustrates the urgency of ensuring that you are protected against phishing attacks. On the one hand, with email security tools such as ours, but also with the protection of all the other channels of communication – not least through a noticeable increase in employee awareness.

The careful handling of the publication and issuing of personal data marks a start in these efforts. After all, the analysis and use of user characteristics, which cyber criminals collect through a variety of communication platforms, is the primary basis for orchestrating targeted attacks.

This was the case with the hacking group Ransomexx when they attacked the famous car manufacturers, Ferrari. They succeeded in getting their hands on 7 GB of internal documents, data sheets and repair manuals, and published the sensitive data on the dark web. According to the Italian media, neither the authorities nor Ferrari have found any trace or those responsible so far.

Not an individual case: A 19-year-old youth recently succeeded in hacking into 25 Teslas remotely and controlling them to make them do whatever he wanted. Another example is the complete shutdown of all the Toyota plants, caused by attackers hacking into the supply chain.

Cybersecurity Ventures, a US firm often cited in the IT industry, estimates that cyber crime caused worldwide damage last year with a value of six trillion dollars. By 2025, the amount could reach 10.5 trillion dollars.

In this respect, there has been a 200% increase in attacks on automobile manufacturers compared with last year – and the trend is rising. The motives of the criminals include the theft of vehicles and/or data from the vehicle owners, or, quite simply, causing the greatest possible degree of economic damage to the companies.

This is an alarming development which we urgently need to counteract.