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
There’s an ongoing discussion, one I normally avoid, regarding how much impact an ESP has on deliverability. Overall, my opinion is that as long as you have a half way decent ESP they have no impact on deliverability. Then I started writing an email and realised that my thoughts are more complex than that.
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: