For over a decade, we handed out an New Team of Weapons and Tactics custom email account to every member who walked through the door. It made sense back when we relied on Google Apps to run our shared docs and internal forms.

But in February 2022, we shook things up. We ditched the third-party cloud hosting and moved everything over to a custom, self-hosted on-premise setup. We wanted direct control over our own data without leaning on outside providers. With that move came a few changes to how we handle resources. We no longer hand out email accounts automatically. Right now, they're strictly reserved for authorized staff (Sergeant and up) and a few veteran members (Corporals) who decided to keep their old accounts during the 2022 switch.

This article aims to describe the information regarding these emails, the privacy and security expectations, how emails are routed, and things of that nature. Note that throughout this article, we are referring to the classic emails that we provided to our legacy members and staff members in the format [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. This article is not discussing emails used by members to signup for this website or anything of that nature.

Inbound Security and Threat Breakdown​

To keep NTWT safe from modern junk and cyber threats, every single incoming email has to clear a multi-layered security gateway before it ever hits your inbox. Here is how we handle it:

• Signature Analysis: We scan everything against a local database to catch known viruses and malware patterns.
• Reputation Filtering: We check the sender's IP and any links inside the email against global threat databases to block obvious spam and phishing attempts.
• Heuristic and Behavioral Scanning: We use advanced logic to spot weird phrasing or sketchy attachment behavior that might point to a "Zero-Day" attack.
• Cloud Detonation: If an attachment looks incredibly shady but hasn't been flagged yet, we might toss it into a secure, isolated third-party sandbox to see what it does before letting it anywhere near our network.

Outbound Delivery and Relay Setup​

We want to make sure official NTWT emails actually land in the recipient's inbox, not their junk folder. To pull this off, we route our outbound mail through a professional third-party relay service.

This setup pushes our emails out through highly reputable IP addresses that fully comply with modern authentication standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. It completely bypasses any local network blacklists and keeps our communications solid with outside partners and organizations.

Data Privacy and Third-Party Interaction​

We take your privacy seriously. That said, you should know that "self-hosted" doesn't mean we exist in a total vacuum. To keep security tight, some of our data has to talk to third-party security services:

• Technical Metadata: We routinely share sender IPs, recipient addresses, and message headers with security vendors to verify if an email is legit.
• Suspicious Samples: Like we mentioned earlier, weird attachments get uploaded to a secure third-party lab for testing.
• Relay Transparency: Our relay provider briefly processes outbound messages to get them delivered, and they scan for spam to protect their own network reputation.

We don't allow these outside services to store your message content a second longer than it takes to perform the security check or deliver the email.

Account Eligibility and Maintenance​

If you have an email account as a veteran or staff member, consider it a "Legacy Support" or "Administrative" tool. Here is how we manage them:

• Support Level: We provide these accounts as a courtesy, and they are entirely hands-off. Absolutely no technical support is offered for client-side configuration or individual deliverability issues. You're mostly on your own here.
• Availability: Email by itself is a complicated service because it's antiquated architecture makes it a modern security nightmare, making it complex and expensive to setup and keep maintained. Because of this, you should know that we may not always offer it. So we absolutely do NOT recommend signing up with any third-party services with your NTWT Email because if we ever do decide to retire the service, you could permanently lose access to accounts created with that email.
• Rank Requirements: You need to hit Sergeant or higher to be eligible for a new organizational email account.
• Termination: If you leave the organization or get demoted below the required rank for cause, we may decommission the email account and its contents with or without prior notice.