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Tools!

I just added a DMARC validation tool over on tools.wordtothewise.com.

You can give it a domain – such as ebay.com – and it will fetch the DMARC record, then explain and validate it. Or you can paste the DMARC record you’re planning to publish into it,  to validate it before you go live.
If you’ve not seen our tools page before, take a look. As well as DMARC we have a DKIM validator, SPF expander and optimizer, general DNS lookup tools, a bunch of RFCs covering all sorts of protocols, and base64 and quoted-printable decoders.
There’s also a widget that lets you add those little unicode pictures to your subject lines, whether you need a snowman ⛄, a forest ????, or a pig getting closer ???.
The results pages all have easily copyable URLs so they’re pretty good for sharing with co-workers or customers if you need that sort of thing.
(And if you need a cidr calculator, whois, or easy access to abuse.net & Microsoft SNDS check out Al’s xnnd.com.)

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Command Line Tools

Tools that you run from the command line – i.e. from a terminal or shell window – are often more powerful and quicker to use than their GUI or web equivalents.

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April 2017: The Month in Email

April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference.
I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for transparency between companies and those they are tracking. More specifically, I talked about the tradeoffs between convenience and security, and how people may not be aware that they are making these tradeoffs when they use popular mailbox tools like unroll.me. The folks over at ReturnPath added a comment on that post about how they handle privacy issues with their mailbox tools.
Steve contributed several posts this month. First up, a due diligence story about how service providers might look more closely at potential customers for their messaging platforms to help curtail spam and other fraudulent activity. He also looked at the history of “/8” IP blocks, and what is happening to them as the internet moves to IPv6. Steve also added a note about his new DMARC Validation tool, which rounds out a suite of free tools we’ve made available on our site. And finally, he showcased a particularly great email subscription experience from Tor.com — have a look!
I highlighted another post about companies doing things right, this one by Len Shneyder over at Marketingland. In other best practices news, I talked about bounce handling again (I mentioned it last month too), and how complicated it can be. Other things that are complicated: responding to abuse complaints. Do you respond? Why or why not?
Our friends at Sendgrid wrote a great post on defining what spammers and other malicious actors do via email, which I think is a must-read for email marketers looking to steer clear of such activity. Speaking of malicious actors, I wrote two posts on the arrest of one of the world’s top email criminals, Peter Levashov, and speculation that he was involved in the Russian hacking activity around the US elections. We’re looking forward to learning more about that story as it unfolds.

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