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SPF and TXT records and Go

A few days ago Laura noticed a bug in one of our in-house tools – it was sometimes marking an email as SPF Neutral when it should have been a valid SPF pass. I got around to debugging it today and traced it back to a bug in the Go standard library.

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Creating emails

Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says:
Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version
Editing
Wait. What?
Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell because with images off that’s the only text in the mail, except the footer and legal information.
When you load images you get a little more clarity. Apparently, making a big enough purchase trigger a bunch of samples to be included in your delivery. So the line possibly should be “Laura, get your natural samples bag.”
Maybe it was intentional. After all it did get me to load images to see what the email was about.

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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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