Message Systems Earns OTA’s 2014 Honor Roll

This post was originally published on The Message Exchange blog.

In 2014, the Online Trust Alliance increased weighting on phishing and fraudulent email protection at the top-level domain, and implementation of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policies in scoring websites for the annual Honor Roll. After earning this honor last year, we wanted to strive for “valedictorian” this year by continuing to stay on top of these security upgrades.

• We made our Privacy Policies a bit clearer, and we’re already planning on improving them further for next year’s awards.
• We took our website’s score from a 95/100 to a perfect 100 by upgrading our SSL Certificates to TLS 1.2.
• We even strove for extra credit above and beyond the norms by having our product teams work toward perfecting all of our DMARC policies.

We’re also always working toward improving the experiences of all users of our products and sites. In the coming year, we’re adding several awesome new features to the websites and upgrading them to fully responsive layouts! These things aren’t required by OTA’s Honor Roll this year, but we feel that they will in the near future. In fact, the 2014 Trust Audit now evaluates variances between websites and their mobile apps on the iOS and Android platforms, in the interest of security controls and privacy best practices.

Thank You to the Online Trust Alliance

Message Systems strives toward a more trustworthy internet. Receiving this honor from the OTA is a welcome pat on the back for those efforts and a significant achievement. Overall only 30.2% of the 800+ sites made the Honor Roll, with 22% making the Honor Roll for the past two years.  Conversely, nearly 53% failed in one of the three categories.  With this in mind, we will continue to push the envelope year after year. In addition to reaching this goal ourselves, several of our clients have also been awarded Honor Roll status in 2014. They include:

Top Scores

Top Social

OTA Members

Congratulations to all our clients, especially Twitter and American Greetings for achieving the best Honor Roll scores! For more information about the Online Trust Alliance Honor Roll, check out our press release. You can also read the 2014 OTA Honor Roll Report here. For a visual summary of top takeaways from this year’s report, check out the following infographic.