Related Posts

Is your website up? Are you sure?

“What would you do for 25% more sales?”
It’s panicked gift-buying season, and I got mail this morning from Boutique Academia, part of their final push before Christmas.
Inbox__18_975_messages__26_unread_
They’re hoping for some Christmas sales in the next three days. They do make some lovely jewelry – ask Laura about her necklace some time – so I clicked on their mail.
Failed_to_open_page
That’s not good. I like Boutique Academia, and fixing email and dns problems is What We Do, so I took a look.
Safari isn’t quite as bad with not-exactly-truthful error messages as Internet Explorer, but I still don’t really trust it. Perhaps the problem is with the click-tracking domain in the email, rather than with boutiqueacademia.com? So I open the base page at http://boutiqueacademia.com, get redirected immediately to https://www.boutiqueacademia.com – which fails to load.
15542402_1501169219896451_6901276936993410491_n
OK, start with the basics. DNS.

Read More

SWAKS: the SMTP Swiss Army Knife

flash_m_laser_1200_900
SWAKS is a general purpose testing tool for SMTP. For basic SMTP testing it’s a more convenient, scriptable alternative to running a transaction by hand, but it also lets you test things that are difficult to do manually, such as authentication or TLS encryption.
It’s a perl script that installs fairly easily on OS X or any Linux/unix system (and can be installed on Windows, if you have perl installed there).
It’s pretty well documented, but it can be a bit overwhelming to start with. Here are some simple recipes:
Send a test email:

Read More

I can't click through if you don't exist

Recipients can’t click through if you don’t exist
A tale of misconfigured DNS wrecking someone’s campaign.
I got mail this morning from A Large Computer Supplier, asking me to fill in a survey about them. I had some feedback for them, mostly along the lines of “It’s been two decades since I bought anything other than rackmount servers from you, maybe I’m not a good advertising target for $200 consumer laptops?” so I clicked the link.
 
Failed_to_open_page
 
(I’ve replaced the real domain with survey.example.com in this post, to protect the innocent, but everything else is authentic).
That’s not good. The friendly error messages web browsers give sometimes hide the underlying problem, but that looks like a DNS problem. Did they do something stupid, like putting the wrong URL in the mail they sent?
 

Read More