On Tuesday I wrote about using DNS wildcards to implement customer-specific subdomains for email authentication. As I said then, that approach isn’t perfect. You’d much prefer to have per-customer domain authentication, where each customer has their own DKIM d= and ideally their own SPF records, rather than having all customers sharing those records and relying on loose DMARC...
If you’re an ESP with small customers you may have looked at the recent Google / Yahoo requirements around DMARC-style alignment for authentication and panicked a bit. Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.…For direct mail, the domain in the...
When you query DNS for something you ask your local DNS recursive resolver for all answers it has about a hostname of a certain type. If you’re going to a website your browser asks your resolver for all records for “google.com” of type “A”1or “AAAA”, but that’s not important right now and it will either return all the A records for google.com it has...
Seen this recently? 451 Message temporarily deferred due to unresolvable RFC.5321 from domain; see This is Yahoo doing some extra work to identify that the 5321.From domain1The return-path, aka the 821.From, 5321.From, or bounce address is the email address you send from at the protocol level, not the email address in the From: header, and it’s the address any bounces will be sent to. of...
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
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post focusing on one small part of bounce handling. Today I want to talk about delivery failures that aren’t bounces. This is really the biggest issue for companies who have written their own bulk sending servers. Modern bulk MTA appliances and ESPs correctly handle these types of bounces. However, when you’re troubleshooting it’s important to know...
A few days ago Laura noticed a bug in one of our in-house tools – it was sometimes marking an email as SPF Neutral when it should have been a valid SPF pass. I got around to debugging it today and traced it back to a bug in the Go standard library. A DNS TXT record seems pretty simple. You lookup a hostname, you get some strings back. Those strings can be used for all sorts of things, but...
There are quite a lot of broken DNS servers out there. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you, but some of them might be yours. And you might not notice that until your domains stop working early next year. DNS is quite an old protocol, and when it was originally specified there wasn’t really a good way to extend the protocol to add new features. That was fixed about 19 years ago...
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is what gives you the little padlock in your browser bar. Some people still call it SSL, but TLS has been around for 18 years – it’s time to move on. TLS provides two things. One is encryption of traffic as it goes across the wire, the other is a cryptographic proof that you’re talking to the domain you think you’re talking to. The second...
It’s easy to tell if a domain is using SPF – look up the TXT record for the domain and see if any of them begin with “v=spf1”. If one does, they’re using SPF. If none do, they’re not. (If more than one does? They’re publishing invalid SPF.) AOL are publishing SPF. Geocities aren’t. For DKIM it’s harder, as a DKIM key isn’t published at a...
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