Nxdomain
I can't click through if you don't exist
Recipients can’t click through if you don’t exist
A tale of misconfigured DNS wrecking someone’s campaign.
I got mail this morning from A Large Computer Supplier, asking me to fill in a survey about them. I had some feedback for them, mostly along the lines of “It’s been two decades since I bought anything other than rackmount servers from you, maybe I’m not a good advertising target for $200 consumer laptops?” so I clicked the link.
(I’ve replaced the real domain with survey.example.com in this post, to protect the innocent, but everything else is authentic).
That’s not good. The friendly error messages web browsers give sometimes hide the underlying problem, but that looks like a DNS problem. Did they do something stupid, like putting the wrong URL in the mail they sent?