testing
Why don’t ESPs warn you, when you’re putting your email together, when you’re about to send the test message, if DMARC is going to fail? It was perhaps considered optional in the past, but from 2024 onward, DMARC effectively becomes mandatory given Gmail and Yahoo’s new sender requirements. Thus, DMARC compliance (and success) has become more important than ever before. Which means that it’s time for sending platforms to start warning people, before somebody sends a big email campaign that’s going to fail DMARC. A big ole blinking “DMARC alert” warning, please and thank you! This is such a great idea that I am saddened that I didn’t think of it. All credit here goes to Big Jason Henderson, who posited that when trying to execute a test send, a warning should pop-up telling you if the send platform thinks a message is likely to fail DMARC, why that is
Or…everything old is new again? Or something? Anyway, seedlist-based inbox testing has been around for a while. Pivotal Veracity was offering it up a good twenty years ago. Its heyday, an ex-PVer reminded me the other day, was 2003-2010, and then it was aquired by Unica, which later ended up folded into IBM … which is now Acoustic? I forget. But the inbox testing platform is long retired, I am sure. Anyway, it’s fun to take a look at the tests from years ago and see how much things change and how much things stay the same. Which mailboxes were tested back when this first test was run in early 2008? AOL, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, CompuServe, Cox, Earthlink, Excite, Gmail, Hotmail, Mail.com, MSN, NetZero/Juno, Road Runner, USA.net, Verizon, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo. A lot of those are since gone or consolidated. I remember Mail.com used to be
Need a fake SMTP server for testing? Chadwan Pawar of PostBox Services suggests Mailhog. It’s an open source SMTP server that captures all mail and gives you a visual dashboard showing you what was received. Much fancier than /dev/null (but that can come in handy sometimes, too).Read more about it over on PostBoxServices and here’s a link to the Mailhog project on Github.