The Daily Parker

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Lunchtime headaches

I'm shaking my head at email service provider Postmark, who four weeks ago announced they would be phasing out support for TLS 1.0 (a network security protocol). I understood this when they announced it in February, 60 days ahead of their cutover to TLS 1.2, but didn't think it applied to anything of mine. This morning they sent a more focused email saying, "you're getting this email because we can see that this applies to you." Panic ensues.

Why panic? Because almost everything I've developed in the last 12 years depends on Postmark for email messaging, and the way they worded their notice, it seemed like all of those apps will fail on April 20th. And the only documentation they supplied relevant to me (and anyone else in the Microsoft universe) was a set of instructions on how to test TLS 1.2 support, not whether this would be a breaking change.

I immediately contacted their support group and said, as nicely as I can, "WTF dudes?" To which they replied, "oh yeah, bummer, dude." So I sent a lengthier reply just now and started digging into their source code. It turns out they're using an out-of-the-box Microsoft component that should transparently switch from TLS 1.0 to TLS 1.2 if asked to do so. I believe, therefore, the affected applications will be fine. In fact, fixing the problem may only require a simple, non-invasive change to Microsoft Azure settings for the affected applications. But I don't know that for sure. And I'm hoping their actual development team will respond with "yeah, no probs, dude, you're cool."

My other headache is literal, from staring at too many screens. So I'll do something else in a moment.

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