Swaks

SWAKS on macOS

SWAKS is my favorite SMTP debugging tool.

A new SMTP server I’m building loses pipelining synchronization when connecting via TLS, and I’m sure the bug will be simple to spot if I can send some test messages in to it and watch the sequence of commands. SWAKS is perfect for that.

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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.

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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.

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Can you STARTTLS?

Email supports TLS (Transport Layer Security), what we used to call SSL.

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Life of an Email

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

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Sending email

I did a class at M3AAWG teaching the basic mechanics of sending an email, both really by hand using dig and netcat, and using SWAKS. No slides, but if you’re interested in the script I’ve posted a very rough copy of my working notes here.

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SWAKS: the SMTP Swiss Army Knife

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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:

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