CategoryTechnical

Sendy and one-click unsubscribe

If you’re using sendy and you’ve found that RFC 8058 one click unsubscribe fails – or, worse, seems to work but doesn’t actually unsubscribe the user – you should take a look at James’ workaround.

Sending domains and hostnames

Lots of times I see someone asking a question and they talk about their sending domain. And it’s sometimes not 100% clear which domain they mean by that – and when we’re talking about alignment and reputation it can make a difference. So here’s a list of (some of?) the different places a mailserver uses a domain. Hostnames Machine Hostname: What the operating system...

Deliveries and Opens and Clicks

I always want to say “Emails, and Opens, and Clicks… Oh My!” when I’m talking about them. We really want to understand how a mailbox provider perceives the streams of email we send them. Some of the things the provider looks at are technical and objective – is the email coming from who it claims to be coming from? Is there an attachment that contains a virus? We have...

SWAKS: Test your SMTP

We’ve mentioned SWAKS here a few times – but I always use it for delivering test mail directly to a recipient’s MX.

Matt, over at EmailKarma, posted today pointing out that it supports authentication, so you can also use it to send email out from your commercial smarthost. Handy.

Check it out.

Anatomy of a Received header

When trying to find out why Something Went Wrong during delivery of an email we sometimes want to look at the route by which it was delivered. Did SPF break because of an unexpected forward? Did DKIM break because an intermediate mailserver modified the content of the message? Why did it take nine hours from the mail leaving our ESP to make it to the inbox? Did it really leave our ESP when they...

Errors in DKIM records

TXT Records DKIM public keys live in DNS TXT records. A DNS TXT record contains strings of text, and each string is limited to be no more than 255 characters long. Recommended practice for DKIM at the moment is to use 2048 bit keys (1024 bit keys aren’t insecure, but they’re looking a bit weak and 2048 is where folks have mostly decided to move to). But a 2048 bit DKIM key is going to...

One-click unsubscribe

The worst thing about the yahoogle requirements has been their use of the term “one-click unsubscribe”. It’s an overloaded term that’s being used here to mean RFC 8058 in-app unsubscription. That’s a completely different thing to what one-click unsubscription has been used to mean for decades, often in the context of complying with legal requirements around...

Don’t trust Gmail’s Show Original

It’s not always easy to know what the actual headers and body of an email as sent look like. For a long time accepted wisdom was that you could send a copy to your gmail account, and use the Show Original menu option to, well, see the original message as raw text. It turns out that’s not actually something you can trust. I used swaks to send a test message with an extra header to my...

About My Email

Happy 2024, everyone! We’ve released a shiny new tool to let folks self-check a lot of common questions we see about email requirements. Go to AboutMy.email and send an email to the email address it gives you. Once it receives that email it will go through it and do many of the basic checks we’d usually do to check the technical health of a client’s email1AboutMy.email is a...

Can you STARTTLS?

Email supports TLS (Transport Layer Security), what we used to call SSL. Unlike the web, which split it’s TLS support off into a completely different protocol – https, listening on port 443 vs http listening on port 80 – SMTP implements it inside it’s non-encrypted protocol. A mailserver advertises that it supports this by having the word “STARTTLS” in the...

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us