I’m repeating the presentation I gave at M3AAWG in London for the Certified Senders Alliance.
It’s all about how to send an email by hand, and how knowing the mechanics of how an email is sent can help us diagnose email delivery issues.
We’re starting in about five hours from when I post this.
Register at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/2268789893122531343
The nice folks over at Postmark shared a new deliverability resource last week. The SMTP Field Manual. This is a collection of SMTP responses they’ve seen in the wild. This is a useful resource. They’re also collecting responses from other senders, meaning we can crowdsource a useful resource for email deliverability folks.
Read MoreAs the volume and severity of malicious email increases, filters are increasingly following links in emails. This is really nothing new. Barracuda and other filters have been inspecting links automatically for years. From what I’ve seen there does seem to be some level of risk analysis based on domain reputation. That makes sense, not only is following links computationally expensive, it can also delay mail receipt.
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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: