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A workaround for OWASP Foundation emails being blocked by Microsoft Office 365

Andrew van der Stock, October 30, 2024

Over the last several months, OWASP, particularly the owasp.com domain, has been blocked from sending messages to tenants of the Microsoft Office 365 platform or those using Microsoft Defender for Office 365, where messages end up blacklisted in quarantine or never received. Organizations that have failed to receive our emails includes legal firms, our HR firm, our accountants, our European affiliate’s accountants and VAT specialists, and many others, including potential sponsors, donors, and members.

This is an untenable situation, and extremely disappointing that we have been unable to resolve this issue with Microsoft. So we have to use a workaround domain, owaspfoundation.org to send emails to Microsoft 365 tenants. This is not ideal, but we have no other choice. We will never use owaspfoundation.org for any other purpose other than to get around this spam filter insanity. We will never send any marketing or other unsolicited emails from this domain, it will not be linked to our MailChimp or our accounting system. Only select staff have access to this domain, and we will only use it when all else fails.