Join us today with another interview in our blog series: Authenticated Answers! We sat down with LoriBeth Blair, Chief Strategy Officer at Email Industries.
At Valimail, we take our work seriously but try not to take ourselves too seriously. This value inspires us to get to the heart of what makes people unique and how it affects their careers to provide valuable advice, inspiration, and insights to people working with email daily.
In this lighthearted interview series, we connect with experts from the email, IT, security, ISP, and authentication spaces to learn more about them and their experiences.
About LoriBeth Blair
LB was a weird little kid who thought tests were toys, not much has changed. LB has worked for a variety of different businesses, including restaurants, comic shops, and even a firearms retailer, before finding her way into the email ecosystem. LB’s academic background in IT audit, information security, and computer forensics has lent itself well to email deliverability and root cause analysis. At Email Industries, LB has helped to grow the world’s best deliverability team and its data-driven approach to putting definitive solutions around email reputation and monitoring.
Fun fact: LB speaks Spanish fluently and dropped out of chef school to work in IT.
How do you stay motivated when learning something challenging or frustrating?
Well, I’m neurodivergent, so these are the easy things for me to remain motivated to learn. If something is challenging, if everyone says it’s hard or impossible, that is more likely to make me charge after trying to fix it. I struggle much more with things that are not challenging, as my manager at IBM once said, “How are you so bad at watching training videos?”
What was the last wall you crashed through?
Being promoted to Chief Strategy Officer at a tech company was a pretty big wall to crash through for someone who grew up rural and low-income. There were certainly a lot of dead ends, pivots, and redirects prior to getting where I am now, but it has taught me the importance of never giving up. I think that’s the number one differentiator for individual success; if you give up, you have a 0% chance of success.
What’s your favorite way to show gratitude?
Words of affirmation are super important, especially when someone has done an exceptional job, but in the workplace, employers should also attach financial rewards to these kudos when appropriate. I’m also a big fan of paying attention to what is going on with folks and their preferences. Remembering small details about folks, like their favorite foods, drinks, places, and key dates really does a lot to make folks feel seen.
What’s the funniest mistake you’ve made, and how’d you handle it?
So we gotta go back to high school for this one. I was the student council president, and I was responsible several days a week for leading the moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance. Our sponsor let me know that I’d been saying the pledge wrong, it’s not “one nation, under god”; it’s “one nation under god” with no comma, no pause. She said the last time they pointed this out, things went crazy wrong. As a member of the varsity debate team and award-willing mock trial competitor, I told them never to fear, I am a professional public speaker.
I then got on the mic and asked everyone to “Please pause for a moment of flag.” I then went straight from the moment of silence into the pledge without asking everyone to first “please rise for the pledge of allegiance,” so I had an entire school full of 1500 students and teachers jumping out of their seats. I did, however, nail the change to the pledge, and when I stepped down from the mic, I didn’t even realize the other two mistakes.
Lesson learned: If you’re going to make a big mistake, at least do it with confidence.
What’s the smallest hill you are willing to die on?
People need to stop stealing Colombia’s country code! Are you a Colombian business? No? Then, you have zero business using a .co domain. I don’t care that it’s only one letter away from being .com. That’s frankly even more reason you shouldn’t use it. It’s probably a cousin of the actual .com, which means it’s a terrible decision to brand your business after it if someone else has the .com.
How important is email authentication for deliverability?
Very!
In the age of AI, deepfakes, spoofing, and the sea of infinite content on the Internet, the real challenge is proving a message’s providence, veracity, and sender’s or publisher’s identity.
Security threats are one of the primary risks that spam filters try to manage for individuals and organizations. According to Verizon’s annual DBIR, 90% of all compromises begin with an email, including phishing, spear phishing, malicious documents, and links, and this has been true for years.
Authentication is essential for messages your organization actually wants to send to protect your recipients against man-in-the-middle attacks and other threats. This is also how you prove to the receiving mail servers that the messages are something your organization legitimately intended to send, assuming authentication passes.
Recently, Google and Yahoo have mandated that senders must be SPF, DKIM, and DMARC compliant to ensure reliable message delivery, and we have already started to see bounce rates rise for non-authenticated mail streams. I think it is necessary to try to shut down one avenue for spoofers by setting a policy on all bulk domains.
How would you explain DMARC to your grandparents, friends, or relatives?
Joke answer: I wouldn’t.
The real answer: I’d say it’s a way of securing a business’s digital assets, such as its domain. DMARC protects a company’s domain against being hijacked for malicious purposes within email.
Do you have any other security tips for readers?
Yes,
- Please use MFA
- Install the operating system and browser updates in a timely fashion
- And always increase your logging
- And be skeptical about every email you receive.
Liked this interview?
