Some Notes on the Machines

Something new:

https://pwpush.com

Try it. https://www.betterbird.eu/. The Thunderbird team has been ignoring huge quantities of bugs and usability issues for decades. They kicked out a profoundly gifted developer several years ago, who has been leading Betterbird, a careful “soft fork” of Thunderbird, which maintains all helpful interoperability while fixing many, many bugs. Betterbird is lighter and faster, it does CardDav address books natively to Gmail and other providers, it has a far better HTML email composer, and much, more more!

If (when) anyone gets a bad actor email, i.e., a “phishing” scam trying to produce misdirection of funds and/or identity theft, those emails should be sent here:

reportphishing@apwg.com

and if it was sent from or arrived into a Microsoft mailbox, also here:

phish@office365.microsoft.com

A sample SMTP conversation.  Blue is transmit, red is receive; all exists within a command-prompt window.  The messages received will vary somewhat, but the initial numbers won’t.  The greater-than and less-than signs (< >) are required. The below works fine in Cygwin with ‘inetutils’ installed (which includes ‘telnet’), or in CMD with the Windows ‘telnet’ installed. Linuxes obviously have various telnets! ‘putty’ on Windows will do it also, in telnet mode, port 25, just replace the first line with GUI putty setup.

telnet mail.srcdomain.com 25

220 mail.destdomain.com ESMTP

HELO test.srcdomain.com

250 mail.destdomain.com

MAIL FROM: <email@srcdomain.com>

250 2.1.0 Sender OK

RCPT TO: <email@destdomain.com>

250 2.1.5 Ok

DATA

354 Enter mail, end with “.” on a line by itself

testing
testing
testing
.

250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as xxxxxxx

Here’s a good one:

https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com/dmarc/dmarc-record-check/

Here is one:

http://www.appmaildev.com/en/dkim

A free tool:

https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com/dmarc/dmarc-record-check/

Awhile ago it came to light that the following needed to be added to SPF records for email-enabled domains using Constant Contact:

include:ccsend.com include:constantcontact.com include:confirmedcc.com

Things have gotten a lot better. The following now covers all of the above:

ip4:208.75.120.0/22

A very good SPF checker:

https://vamsoft.com/support/tools/spf-policy-tester

Here is possibly the original SPF checker:

http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html

To do a deep study of a bounceback, the best tool this writer has ever seen is here:

https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/

in the Message Analyzer tab. Just paste every header you have into there and submit, and then read. Lots and lots of excellent information comes up.

Try DavMail:

http://davmail.sourceforge.net

It runs in the background on server, desktop, or laptop (Windows, Linux, or Mac), and it translates native Exchange protocols into that which Thunderbird and appropriate add-ins handle very well. In other words, it acts as a live bridge between Exchange protocols and Thunderbird with Lightning, for contacts and calendar. The instructions are thorough and functional.