E-Mail Information

South Brunswick Township uses “state of the practice” e-mail defense mechanisms that are also used by a growing number of public and private agencies around the world.  It is imperative that the Township communicates only with legitimate organizations and people, and protects itself (and its residents, vendors and the public at large, from mischievous or malicious messages which can do great harm.

The Township uses automation to regularly inspect and validate all e-mail coming into the Township.  Messages flagged as “suspicious” in nature are typically “blocked” from delivery, with no notice sent back to the sender when this happens. When some of these validations fail, your message to Township recipients (user@sbtnj.net or user@sbpdnj.net) is blocked (not delivered), and there is no message sent back to the sender when this happens. (We cannot “respond” when we get such e-mails as we can not be sure the response would go to the correct person.)

Types of inspections/validations we perform on all incoming e-mail:

1. Attached files are scanned for known software viruses, and links in those attachments are checked against lists of malicious websites, and the link is inspected to see if the use of that link results in going to that website (or is redirected elsewhere). (Certain attachment file types are not allowed at all, e.g., executable programs, scripts and macros.
2. E-mail messages are scanned for well-known phrases that are popularly used by spammers and malicious actors, e.g., “A voicemail message has arrived in your mailbox”, “Act now…,” “You’ve been selected,” “100% free,” “You won…”.
3. The address of the sender is subjected to a number of checks intended to defend against spoofing (“pretending” to come from other people or domains). These include “No SPF record”, “No PTR record”, “DKIM Validation failure” and “DMARC failure”. The reasons for these failures are technical in nature, but whomever supports your private domain name and/or e-mail system should know how to mitigate these errors, which are all under the control of whomever is managing the “domain name” of your e-mail address (everything after the “@”).
4. There are a number of other validations performed including the use of “blacklisted” senders (organizations known to be sources of viruses, SPAM, etc.), e-mail coming from certain foreign locations, etc. For security purposes, we will not go into further detail.

If you send e-mail to South Brunswick Township and you suspect your e-mail is being blocked (no response within a reasonably expected timeframe), you will need to contact the intended party by other means (e.g., call them, or use a personal e-mail account on gmail, msn or O365). The recipient (a Township employee) can then contact the Township’s IT Department to check whether such e-mail is indeed being blocked.  Hint: if you sent your e-mail message to multiple people in the Township, and at least one recipient responded to you, then you should assume the others have received it (unless you mistyped their name!)   Note that the IT Department will not respond directly to e-mail senders on this issue, nor will your domain be exempted from this validation.  

E-mail sent directly from the largest providers such as Gmail, MSN, AOL, Hotmail and O365 (using e-mail addresses like userid@gmail.com, userid@msn.com, etc.) usually do not get blocked for No SPF Record issues. However,  this problem occurs with organizations that are using their own customized domain names, but using Gmail, O365, etc., as the underlying mail transport system.  For example, if your e-mail is “someone@myengineeringfirm.com” but you use Gmail to host your e-mail, someone needs to change the “DNS entry for myengineeringfirm.com”  to explicitly authorize “gmail.com” to send e-mail on behalf of your domain