cool tools
Here’s a link to DMARCian’s DMARC Dictionary. Say that ten times fast! Then bookmark it, because it’ll come in handy as you navigate this new world of DMARC. And don’t forget to keep their DMARC Inspector link handy, too.
Do you know about Swaks? Maybe not! It is perhaps not very widely known, but it is an amazingly useful tool. Swaks, created and maintained by John Jetmore, is billed as a “Swiss Army Knife for SMTP” and that’s an apt description. What is it? It’s an SMTP testing utility. It lets you watch as it connects to a remote mail server and attempts to send an email message using the values you specify. You can specify the sender, recipient, and which server to connect to. You can also specify body content, if you want, though it has a good default “this is a test” setting. And it has been updated, with version 20240103.0 newly released in January 2024. New features include BCC and CC support, TLS debugging and improvements, improved documentation and other enhancements. Swaks is a technical email nerd’s best friend. I use it to test things like:
Steve Atkins from Word to the Wise just released a very cool new tool called Aboutmy.Email. Bookmark it now! What do you do with it? Go to the Aboutmy.Email website, copy the unique email address it hands you, and launch your newsletter or campaign to that address. What happens next? Aboutmy.Email gives you a detailed report, checking your domains, headers, content and more to look for problems. It even has a “Good Practice” review section, which is code for “Does your email seem to comply with the new Yahoo and Gmail sender requirements?” Want to see an example report? Here’s one for a Spam Resource newsletter. What are all the checks it does? Steve says that it reviews: SPF, DKIM, DMARC BIMI, including details about the certificate and image What IP address it was sent from, and whether it has valid DNS The size of the mail as sent (no
Need help creating your DKIM key? Specifically, the private key file and public key info that you’ll publish in DNS? MessageBird (acquirer of Sparkpost (itself the acquirer of eDataSource), has got a cool little tool for you that’ll do just that. Give it the domain name and selector and it’ll generate everything you need. They support up to 2048-bit keys today, which should be good enough for the moment. (Long term, we need to go larger, but there is a good chance that there is some infrastructure out there somewhere that might choke on keys larger than 2048 bits. That’s a challenge to tackle another day.)Find it here: MessageBird DKIM Wizard.
Julia Evans aka b0rk is somebody smart that I follow on Twitter. She created this super cool tool that I’ve linked to on social media before, called Mess with DNS, providing you with a safe space to learn about DNS by doing — letting you set up DNS records under a test domain she’s got set up — so you can truly “mess with DNS” without breaking anything for your own (or your employer’s) domain.And now she’s back with something new and super cool — a 28-page guide (zine) called “How DNS Works!” Guess what it explains? Yep, how DNS works. Lots and lots of detail here, very useful for somebody who wants to better understand how the domain name service actually works. And when you’ve got the guide in hand (available for a modest fee from her zines website), then head on over to “Mess with DNS” and practice…
Remember EML files? Of course you do, but if not, I’ve blogged on the topic here previously.If you need to edit or view the raw headers or source from an email message, you can always just rename that file’s extension, changing it from “.eml” to “.txt” and then opening it up in your favorite text editor.But what if you want to do more? Here are three cool tools that allow you to visualize, extract or edit the content from EML files. What’s great about these is that each of the tools has a different focus.First, there’s emailpreview from Stephanie Griffith. Upon visiting, the first words you’ll see are, “Saving emails is a pain in the ass. We made it easy.” She’s right on both counts. Using this cool tool, you can take an EML file, or a URL, or raw HTML, and create an email preview image that you can…
I wanted to take a few minutes to let folks know about this cool website called Email Resources. It’s not just cool because we both use the word “resource” (though that doesn’t hurt!). It contains “A curated collection of the best email resources to help you at every step of your email workflow,” lovingly crafted by Avi Goldman.It’s got a whole bunch of links to a whole bunch of useful things, things aboutEmail strategy, design, accessibility, coding and QA;Email sending, data, learning career and community;And of course, links related to that thing I talk about all the time, deliverability! Teeing you up to learn more about ISP tools, deliverability vendors and associated suites of tools, authentication monitoring, other utilities, and certification vendors.I reached out to Avi Goldman to ask him what inspired him to put Email Resources together. He said, “I’d been collecting resources for myself for a while and…