email tools
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:
Hey, *nix users! Did you know that you can send email using cURL? If you weren’t aware, cURL “is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for ‘Client URL’ (wikipedia).” It’s a very handy tool for those of us working in the email security, anti-spam or software-as-a-service space, allowing us to interact with web servers and services to download files and data. I use it quite a bit. But I had no idea that it can speak SMTP! It doesn’t look too difficult, either.Here’s how I tested it myself, composing the command thusly (ignore those goofy quotes at the start and end): curl –ssl-reqd –url ‘smtp://gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com:25’ –mail-from blarfengar@xnnd.com –mail-rcpt nugget@wombatmail.com –upload-file –