Email

Get your company implementing DMARC now…

During the past 5-6 years email industry efforts have been pushing the DMARC standard along. It provides the best widely supported and seemingly efficient way to - as a domain-owner - protect the domain from misuse and abuse in terms of spam and phishing attacks.

As sending email has often been a wild-west, and knowing who is a valid sender of email may prove a challenge for many companies - and as most IT developers does seem to care too much about the finer details of email (and production just as bad email headers as HTML markup :-) ), implementing DMARC protection on your domain may actually be a challenge.

As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.

On Linux…

While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.

As stated earlier this site is now running on a DigitalOcean droplet. A droplet is basically the same as having a “real server”, and when running a bare bones machine, it isn’t born with the ability to handle email - receiving nor sending. As a number of web apps require the ability to handle mail, I had to setup facilities on the server (or droplet) to handle mail.

The “default” way to do this would probably be to install sendmail or postfix, as they are full-featured mail server, but configuring a mail-server, keeping it secure and updated is a nightmare I’d like to avoid. Therefore it was time to look for another option.

Suppose you got an important mail, but by accident deleted the message – and to make matters worse, you also decided that emptying the mailbox was a pretty neat idea. Is then time to Panic?

Well it might, but there is a chance you might be able to undelete the message – and quite easily if you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine. Here are the few steps, which has helped recover a lost mail or two… First close Thunderbird. Then located the mail directory (on Linux it’s located in the subdirectory .mozilla-thunderbird in you home directory – on windows most likely somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings*\Application Data\Thunderbird – In there you’re looking for the “Local Folders” directory.

Many online sites such as news-sites and other content providers often have a “tip a friend” option. With this you can mail a friend and tell them about an interesting piece of content you’ve found. The Idea seems quite simple, and everyone should have the tip-option, wright? - no, wrong. While it may offer a convenience for some, it has several backsides.

First if you - or your email provider - has implemented anti-spam techniques such as SPF-records, the “tipping mail” will not be sent through the authorized list of mail-servers and thus have a larger likelihood of being labeled as spam. Your mail be sent, but you don’t know if it will arrive in your friends mailbox.