Too much email on the brain

Last night I was cruising through our local news website. I see the headline New SPF guidelines coming our way.
My first thought was, “Wow, SPF made the paper?” Now, I live in the SF Bay area so there are a lot of technology related stories that hit our paper which might not see the light of day in other areas. But, still: new SPF guidelines hit the local paper before I’ve heard about it? That seems a little strange.
Then I notice that it’s in the “Living” section. That’s even stranger.
Oh, well, if there’s new SPF stuff, I’d better click and see what is going on with SPF. The internal headline is Beauty Tuesday: New SPF guidelines accompanied by a picture of sunscreen. It was only then I realized it wasn’t about sender policy framework but was about sun protection.
A bit of a picard-facepalm2 moment for me.
Happy Friday, everyone.

Related Posts

Troubleshooting tools

There have been a number of comments on my post about Hotmail moving to SPF authentication having to do with troubleshooting authentication failures. I have been helping clients troubleshoot these issues, and am able to take on new clients to solve authentication problems. Contact me for more information.
Of course, many of these issues can be solved with access to the right tools. Steve’s been working on a number of tools that may help the troubleshooting process and we’ve recently launched them on Emailstuff.org. The website itself contains a number of DNS and data related tools we use for investigations and thought we’d share with the public at large.
One of the really useful tools is the SPF record expander. Plug in any domain, like google.com, and see what IP addresses they authorize to send mail.

Read More

SPF Fail: too many DNS lookups

I’ve had a couple folks come to me recently for help troubleshooting SPF failures. The error messages said the SPF record was invalid, but by all checks it was valid.
Eventually, we tracked the issue down to how many include files were in the SPF record.
The SPF specification specifically limits the number of lookups that can happen during a SPF check.

Read More

Happy 4th of July

Judging by my inbox and the spam filter here on the blog spammers have taken the week off. We’re mostly following suit here, and I won’t be blogging the rest of the week.
To all my fellow American residents, enjoy the day off and the fireworks. Be careful if you are setting some off and live in a dry area, fires are scary.
 
 

Read More