dns tools
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
Did you know? For the past fifteen years, I’ve run a simple little website at xnnd.com that provides a set of DNS lookup tools. My goal was to have a simple set of tools to help you troubleshoot DNS issues. You can do things like look up DMARC settings for a domain, try to find the DKIM selector(s) in use for a domain, check a domain’s BIMI record, query the same IP or domain against a bunch of different public DNS servers all at once (helpful to catch intermittent or propagation-related issues), and a few other things. This past weekend I moved XNND from Amazon’s AWS to Google Cloud (partly to save some money, and partly to see if I could do it), and so far it seems to have moved over just fine — but if you see anything amiss, please feel free to let me know!
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…