TXT Archives - ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary ☩ Walking in Light with Christ

Posts Tagged ‘TXT’

How to add multiple email accounts in qmail’s vpopmail with vpasswd via ssh (console) / Little shell script to add multiple email addresses

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

I’ve been assigned the task to add on one of the qmail powered servers I administrate about 50 email addresses via command line.

Each email addresses was required to be configured to have the same mail password.
Adding the email addresses via an interface would be a killing time consuming task and will probably require at least 1 hour of time to add the emails with qmailwebmin, qadmin, qubit or the other vpopmail qmail web administration interfaces available nowdays.

To solve the task, I’ve used a line oner bash shell script which reads all my 80 emails from a file and adds them with vpopmail’s command line tool vpasswd on the mail server.

Here is the one liner shell script I’ve written to solve the task:

debian:~# while read line; do vadduser $line Email_Pass_Phrase; done < email_list_file.txt

In above’s code I’ve used the email_list_file.txt file is a text file on the server and contains list of all my 50 email addresses, where each line in the file contains one email. The Email_Pass_Phrase is actually the password I’ve set for all the new email addresses being created with vpasswd

That’s all now the 50 email addresses on the server are created and I’ve saved at least one hour of boring repeating actions in the browser 😉

Tags: administrate, bash shell script, browser, command, command line tool, consuming, email accounts, email addresses, email list, file, file txt, interface, killing time, line, little shell, lt, mail password, mail server, new email, nowdays, password, phrase, qadmin, Qmail, qubit, read, servers, Shell, ssh, time, time consuming task, tool, TXT, vadduser, vpasswd, vpopmail, web administration
Posted in Qmail, System Administration | No Comments »

How to convert html pages to text in console / terminal on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

HTML to Plain Text Convertion on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

I’m realizing the more I’m converting to a fully functional GUI user, the less I’m doing coding or any interesting stuff…
I remembered of the old glorious times, when I was full time console user and got a memory on a nifty trick I was so used to back in the day.
Back then I was quite often writing shell scripts which were fetching (html) webpages and converting the html content into a plain TEXT (TXT) files

In order to fetch a page back in the days I used lynx – (a very simple UNIX text browser, which by the way lacks support for any CSS or Javascipt) in combination with html2text – (an advanced HTML-to-text converter).

Let’s say I wanted to fetch a my personal home page https://www.pc-freak.net/, I did that via the command:

$ lynx -source https://www.pc-freak.net/ | html2text > pcfreak_page.txt

The content from www.pc-freak.net got spit by lynx as an html source and passed html2pdf wchich saves it in plain text file pcfreak_page.txt
The bit more advanced elinks – (lynx-like alternative character mode WWW browser) provides better support for HTML and even some CSS and Javascript so to properly save the content of many pages in plain html file its better to use it instead of lynx, the way to produce .txt using elinks files is identical, e.g.:

$ elinks -source https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/ | html2text > pcfreak_blog_page.txt

By the way back in the days I was used more to links , than the superior elinks , nowdays I have both of the text browsers installed and testing to fetch an html like in the upper example and pipe to html2text produced garbaged output.

Here is the time to tell its not even necessery to have a text browser installed in order to fetch a webpage and convert it to a plain text TXT!. wget file downloading tools supports source dump as well, for all those who did not (yet) tried it and want to test it:

$ wget -qO- https://www.pc-freak.net | html2text Anyways of course, some pages convertion of text inside HTML tags would not properly get saved with neither lynx or elinks cause some texts might be embedded in some elinks or lynx unsupported CSS or JavaScript. In those cases the GUI browser is useful. You can use any browser like Firefox, Epiphany or Opera ‘s File -> Save As (Text Files) embedded functionality, below is a screenshot showing an html page which I’m about to save as a plain Text File in Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox iceWeasel Opera etc. save html webpage as plain text on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD

Besides being handy in conjunction with text browsers, html2text is also handy for converting .html pages already existing on the computer’s hard drive to a plain (.TXT) text format.
One might wonder, why would ever one would like to do that?? Well I personally prefer reading plain text documents instead of htmls 😉
Converting an html files already existing on hard drive with html2text is done with cmd:

$ html2text index.html >index.txt

To convert a whole directory full of .html (documentation) or whatever files to plain text .TXT , cd the directory with HTMLs and issue the one liner bash loop command:

$ cd html/ html$ for i in $(echo *.html); do html2text $i > $(echo $i | sed -e 's#.html#.txt#g'); done

Now lay off your back and enjoy reading the dox like in the good old hacker days when .TXT files were fashionable 😉

Tags: advanced html, character mode, command lynx, content, convertion, course, CSS, drive, file, freak, full time, glorious times, gnu linux, html pages, html source, HTML-to-text, html2text, index, interesting stuff, javascipt, Javascript, Lynx, necessery, nifty trick, page, page txt, pcfreak, PDF, personal home page, Shell, shell scripts, spit, support, terminal, text, text browser, text converter, time, trick, TXT, unix text, wget
Posted in Everyday Life, FreeBSD, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various | 1 Comment »

Convert Windows / MS-DOS end of line characters (CR/LF) to UNIX (LF) with sed

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

I guess everyone has ended up with problems into a script files written under Windows using some text editor which incorrectly placed into the end of lines Windows (rn) end of lines instead of the UNIX (r).
Those who have have already take advantage of the nice tiny utility dos2unix which is capable of convert the Windows end of lines to UNIX. However some older UNIXes, like SunOS or HP-UX does not have the dos2unix utility into the list of packages one can install or even if its possible to install dos2unix it takes quite a hassle.
In that cases its good to say convertion of end of lines can be done without using external end programs by simply using UNIX sed .
The way to remove the incorrect Windows ^M (as seen in unix text editors) is by using the sed one liner:

server# sed 's/.$//' file-with-wrong-windows-eol.txt > file-with-fixed-unix-eol.txt

Tags: Advantage, Convert, convertion, cr lf, dos2unix, editor, hassle, hp, HP-UX, line, liner, list, MS-DOS, script, server, sunos, text, tiny utility, TXT, unix, unix text editors, UNIXes, using unix, utility, way, Windows
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

How to enable Domain Keys (DKIM) in Qmail toaster based mail server install on Debian Linux

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Qmail dkim domain keys logo

Recently the Emails sent by one of the Qmail mail servers running on a Debian host started suddenly delivering in Spam folder in both Gmail.com and yahoo.com public mail services.

This is pretty nasty as many of the websites which used the local qmail server to deliver emails concerning subscriptions and other kind of services provided by the websites started ending in Span and thus many of the users who used their Yahoo Mail account and Google Mail – gmail accounts was unable to read emails mailed by the various websites forms and scripts which were sending emails.
You can imagine the negative effect all this “minor” mail issues had on website visitors count and the overall websites functionality.
To come up with some kind of solution to this mail issues, I did quite a lot of research to understand if Yahoo and Google Mail services has some kind of mail server delist form or some reporting service where one can delist a specific mail server as a spammer one or get some kind of help, but unfortunately it seems neither google nor yahoo has any kind of web based way to remove hosts or ip addresses of legit mail servers who has mistakenly been recognized as spam servers.

During my efforts to find a solution to the situation I red a lot of posts and forums online as well as Google’s Bulk Sender Guidelines, none if it was too helpful though.

The QMAIL server had a proper:
1. MX Record 2. TXT SPF records 3. PTR Record 4. There are proper correct mail message headers 5. Proper mails charset and encoding 6. The mail server IP is not listed anywhere in any mail blacklists (e.g. www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx / spamhaus.org) 7. A correct SMTP greeting which matched the mail server domain name

The only thing which was missing on the mail server (checked against Google’s Bulk Sender Guidelines) was a properly configured DKIM and Domainkeys.

Thus in order to get around the situation I went the way and configured the qmail server to include and send in the mail header also Domain Keys

In this article I will briefly explain step by step how I configured Domain keys (DKIM) signing of my mails:

There are few ways domain keys signing can be implemented with Qmail.

1. By patching qmail binaries to support domain keys signing

I wanted to omit any interventions concerning the well running qmail install so I decided not to go this way.
Plus there are plenty of add-ons for qmail and as I have no time to test them the idea not to temper the existing qmail installation looked wise to me.
2. Use a wrapprer script around qmail-remote that invokes externally domainkeys binaries

This kind of solution was fitting me better and therefore I took this route to enable my qmail DKIM signing.

There are few approaches one can take described online:

Use a perl script wrapper which does does the DKIM signing (http://manuel.mausz.at/coding/qmail-dkim/)

I tried using the qmail-dkim-0.2.pl wrapper script following the exact steps described to be fulfilled to enable my outgoing mails dkim signature, however for some reason after substituting the qmail-remote with qmail-dkim.pl and setting the proper permissions, my outgoing mails failed completely and each mail I sent was returned back by the qmail MAILER-DAEMON

Use a bash shell script wrapper in combination with libdomainkeys‘s with a Mail-DKIM-0.39 .

I gave a try to this approach and thanksfully it worked after a bit of struggle to tune it up.

Here is what exactly I had to do to in order to have the domain keys signing to work using the above described qmail-remote.sh shell script wrapper

1. Install openssl related required debian packages

debian:~# apt-get install openssl libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libmail-dkim-perl ...

2. Create necessery directories and RSA key pairs for DomainKeys

debian:~# mkdir -p /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com debian:~# cd /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl genrsa -out rsa.private_default 768 debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl rsa -in rsa.private_default -out rsa.public_default -pubout -outform PEM debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# ln -sf rsa.private_default default debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# touch selector debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# echo 'default' >> selector

Where mydomain.com is the mail domain I need the DKIM signatures for.

I have written a small shell script which automates the task of adding new domainkeys directories and generating the RSA keys with openssl, you can download my generate_qmail_domainkey_rsa automator script here

3. Set proper permissions and owner to /etc/domainkeys directory

debian:~# chmod -R 0600 /etc/domainkeys debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail /etc/domainkeys

4. Generate public domain key for DNS TXT records

debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# grep -v ^- rsa.public_default | perl -e 'while(<>){chop;$l.=$_;}print "k=rsa; t=y; p=$l;n";'

“k=rsa; t=y; p=MHwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADawAwaAJhAMlDcYMrpWP9ouQOlFVtCHcFY
+gxrSQ6SegYeP4eeG7NECT/3jBqDtxANIVhaS9ASkEO4yNisGu4yX/DRclTm
nPWknoDtCDiD7IFEzT37qn1JLzcuknTncmFBFMDRUJq6wIDAQAB;”

The above key is used in next step 5 to set it as a TXT DNS record.

5. Create the DNS records in Name server

With BIND DNS server you need to place a records like:

_domainkey.example.com. IN TXT "k=rsa; t=y; o=-;" default._domainkey.example.com. IN TXT " p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC2RkvFHbhqM/bVbb kBtZ1cZUSYcjC4q+PWjd1tFopT+HXXR9Ctx7FZ1guX5fGboiwYmhCYdVroI KRM3I48/YyQoXxtn3iYZ086v8BHaNtkcBMY+68JeEQ3K0WQkbqQXp/tsnLY SQW1yXiEo9CywxVdpwH+OY94HxK4fAbw6V11cwIDAQAB"

! The above p= key specified is the one generated in step 5.

6. Download and compile & install Mail-DKIM-0.39 ‘s perl extension

As of time of writting latest Mail-DKIM is ver. 0.39, however it’s a good idea to check and install the latest available version available on http://www.cpan.org

a) Download Mail-DKIM

debian:~# cd /usr/local/src debian:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz ... 2011-05-25 15:09:37 (264 KB/s) - `Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz' saved [87375/87375] ... b) Compile & Install Mail-DKIM

debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo Mail-DKIM-0.39 debian:/usr/local/src# cd Mail-DKIM-0.39

debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# su hipo
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ perl Makefile.PL
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ make
…
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ exit
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# make install
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# cd script
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39/script# cp -rpf * /usr/local/bin; cd /usr/local/src

Note that the dkimsign.pl which is in the Mail-DKIM-0.39 is a very important tool used later by the qmail-remote wrapper script. This perl script is copied in the last command issued in above chunk of code.
In the up-command lines I use my unprivileged username hipo to compile, here use any non-root user is appropriate.
For instance it’s possible that the cpan user is used as a compile time user, I was lazy to configure CPAN thus I choose to use my normal unprivileged user.

c) configure rsa domain key paths in dkimsing.pl

Another thing to do here is to make sure the /usr/local/bin/dkimsign.pl which was just recently installed has a correct set location for it’s KeyFile variable.
This vailable is in the script is located online 64, I changed it to include my rsa domain key file, after I changed it, now it looks like so:

KeyFile => "/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com/default"

7. Download and install libdomainkeys

a) Download libdomainkeys
For latest version of libdomainkeys make sure you check on http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/

debian:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz debian:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz ... debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo libdomainkeys-0.69 debian:/usr/local/src# cd libdomainkeys-0.69; su hipo

b) Compile and install libdomainkeys binaries

debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ echo '-lresolv' > dns.lib debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ make clean & & make debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ exit debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69# cp -rpf dktest dknewkey expected makeheader /usr/local/bin/

There is a note to make here, one of the programs part of libdomainkeys called dnstest is not compiled while doing make for unknown reasons?!
I was not able to compile manually dnstest either using gcc like so:

debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ gcc -o dnstest dnstest.c dnstest.c: In function 'main': dnstest.c:11: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'strle' /tmp/ccH78KZ1.o: In function 'main': dnstest.c:(.text+0x2b): undefined reference to 'dns_text' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I have absolutely no clue why it fails o_O, but it doesn’t matter since I figured out that domainkeys header signature is properly set even without dnstest.

Let me mark here that echo ‘-lresolv’ > dns.lib you see in above code chunk is absolutely necessery in order to be able to compile libdomainkeys on Debian based distributions. If the ‘-lresolv > dns.lib’ is omitted the libdomainkeys build fails with error:

gcc -DBIND_8_COMPAT -O2 -o dktest dktest.o -L. -ldomainkeys -lcrypto `cat dns.lib` `cat socket.lib` ./libdomainkeys.a(dns_txt.o): In function `dns_text': dns_txt.c:(.text+0x2d): undefined reference to `__res_query' dns_txt.c:(.text+0xc4): undefined reference to `__dn_expand' dns_txt.c:(.text+0x184): undefined reference to `__dn_expand' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [dktest] Error 1

8. Install libdkim (source of the libdkimtest binary later used by qmail-remote wrapper script)

debian:/usr/local/src# su hipo debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19.zip debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch debian:/usr/local/src$ unzip libdkim-1.0.19.zip debian:/usr/local/src$ cd libdkim/src debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ make && exit debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src# make install

The above install will install libdkimtest binary, used by the wrapper script to do the actual DKIM-Signature, the binary gets installed in /usr/local/bin/libdkimtest.
Here is a link to patched version of libdkim 1.0.19 , to use it instead of patching as described above download the archive untar and do a make clean && make && install

9. Download qmail-remote.wrapper (qmail-remote wrapper shell script) and set it to wrap qmail-remote

a) Copy original qmail-remote to qmail-remote.orig

debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote qmail-remote.orig

b) Download qmail-remote.wrapper script

Here is the qmail-remote.sh wrapper script that worked for me
Originally the wrapper script is taken from http://www.memoryhole.net/qmail/, big thanks to Russ Nelson for writting the awesome wrapper script.

debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin/ debian:/var/qmail/bin# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail-remote.wrapper Saving to: `qmail-remote.wrapper'

100%[============================>] 1,164 –.-K/s in 0s

2011-05-25 15:46:54 (142 MB/s) – `qmail-remote.wrapper’ saved [1164/1164]

c) Set proper permissions to the qmail-remote.wrapper script

The permissions of qmail-remote should look like so:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root qmail 1164 2011-05-25 11:05 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote*

To set this permissions I used:

debian:/var/qmail/bin# chmod 755 qmail-remote.wrapper debian:/var/qmail/bin# chown qmailq:qmail qmail-remote.wrapper

d) Create /var/domainkeys directory (necessery for proper qmail remote wrapper script operations)

debian:~# mkdir /var/domainkeys debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail /var/domainkeys debian:~# chmod 700 -R /var/domainkeys

e) Substitute original qmail-remote binary with the wrapper script:

debian:~# qmailctl stop Stopping qmail... qmail-send qmail-smtpd debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote.wrapper qmail-remote debian:/var/qmail/bin# qmailctl start Starting qmail

10. Send test email to @gmail.com or @yahoo.com to test if DKIM-Signature is included in the mail header

I used my installed webmail interface squirrelmail and send a test email to my home mail server and as well as to yahoo.com

The headers of the email looked fine, here is how my DKIM signed mail headers looked like:

From - Thu May 26 15:31:37 2011 X-Account-Key: account11 X-UIDL: 1306413169.97071.pcfreak,S=1244 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-Mozilla-Keys:

Return-Path: <root@mail.mydomain.com> Delivered-To: hipo@www.pc-freak.net Received: (qmail 97068 invoked by uid 1048); 26 May 2011 12:32:49 -0000 Received: from mail.mydomain.com (83.170.100.100) by mail.www.pc-freak.net with SMTP; 26 May 2011 12:32:49 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/ DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=default; d=mydomain.com;

b=ZnTDdUexnt8fmuHbVNXIC+JDvNLYO1zjzlI3PODe3e1oMS5dRHzVGujrS1
Yk0qqs2oW7DseZg/iHE9KOLZBeInksOnsmLsDBq1Lvzfv2xejikR52LBg6a/uK
ewECJy4jQA4cwMJ/qUxmK8EDwbgj7jqCVB95FK3Z5EdR4HoaqGQ=;

h=Received:Date:Message-ID:From:To:Subject;
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com; h=date
:message-id:from:to:subject; s=default; q=
/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com/default;
bh=G32d6y8oiLehRzcuIWr9s
S+Jy+g=;
b=TPW5VXq3vlOUf1T7lfxQC00MN0kPJxaASE/gq7LbHyV1Gj/Xj+GLF
UN6hYVeKnsoKKeV108JVGcfvfTaLogsxGyS9XzUXKlLtESBj4wr/DAOQy
OcHCj75
bEOOd9nv+RehOYinXGmx0JUZpCNHGndNZ1AEabbVEiX/NQAL7iKDnE
=
Received: (qmail 28771 invoked by uid 0); 26 May 2011 12:31:30 -0000
Date: 26 May 2011 12:31:30 -0000
Message-ID: <20110526123130.28770.qmail@mail.mydomain.com>
From: root@mail.mydomain.com
To: hipo@www.pc-freak.net
Subject: testing 123

baklavavav
tatta

Notice the two lines in the above pasted header:

DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com; h=date

This clearly shows that now both Domainkeys and DKIM are being applied to outgoing mail messages 🙂

However to be completely 100% sure the domainkeys and DKIM signing is correct, you should check the online websites which offer a mail domainkey check and DKIM signature check, an example for such a website that I used in order to test that my SSL RSA Domainkeys and DKIM correspond correctly to the ones specified in the DNS server is:
here

The idea for writting this small guide on configuring Domainkeys with Qmail and Linux is seriously inspired by Mariuz’s Blog post dkim wrapper that works using dk Hope this is helpful to somebody, it took me quite a while until I come up with the exact steps of a workable install of Domain Keys, there are so many tutorials and ways to implement this that at a certain point it’s a hell.
Like always with Qmail, even simple things are so complex, the only good thing about qmail is once you make it work well, it works forever … until the next time you will have to spend few days trying to figure it out 😉

I’m very much looking to hear if people followed the tutorial succesfully.

Any feedback concerning the article is mostly welcome!
Cheers!

Tags: briefly, Bulk, charset, com, correct mail, Date, DKIM-Signature, dnstest, domain, Domainkeys, Emails, exit, exitdebian, form, function, Gmail, google, header, help, host, ip addresses, libdkimtest, Linux, lot, mail issues, mail message, mail server, mail servers, mail services, message headers, mx record, mxtoolbox, nameThe, none, ptr, public mail, qmailctl, reporting service, root, script, server domain, server ip, signing, soccerfame, spamhaus, spammer, SPF, test, text, toaster, TXT, website visitors, wget, wrapper, yahoo mail account
Posted in Linux, System Administration | 21 Comments »

How to set up a proper mail server SPF TXT record in Bind (named) DNS server

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

I’ve recently figured out that some of the SPF records I’m using for some of the administrated by me mail servers, was found to be incorrect by Microsoft’s mail servers for hotmail.com, msn.net and live.com .

Probably the SPF records that I used by so far were found to be incorrect by other mail account service providers also.
As a consequence of this wrongly considered SPFs” Microsoft mail servers were either rejecting my mail server messages or putting the received messages in the Junk folder.

The SPF records which were shown as incorrect according to Microsoft SPF checking Mechanism called SenderID SPF Record Wizard were defined in my bind dns domain zone file as follows:

mydomainname.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 mx ip4:123.124.128.125 ~all"

Using this TXT SPF record dns configuration Microsoft’s Sender ID SPF Record Wizard claimed I had no SPF records at all e.g., checking with the wizard I was returning the error

No SPF Record Found

Microsoft’s Sender ID Framework SPF Record Wizard is available from: The URL address http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/.

Therefore if you’re experiencing some kind of difficulties with sending properly email messages to Microsoft mail domain names or to some other major mail providers like Yahoo, it’s very likely that you might have a misconfigured SPF record just like me.

To deal with the situation I had to check my SPF record with the simple:

"v=spf1 a -all"

The complete TXT record which needs to be placed in the zone file of your domain name looks like so:

mydomainname.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 a -all"

The the meaning of this TXT SPF record is that the IP address in the “A” record for the name is theonly IP address that’s allowed to use that server’s name

After that change hopefully if you’re experiencing mails entering automatically in Junk filter / mail folder with msn.com, hotmail.com, live.com or yahoo.com this problems should be immediately solved.

Checking again with the the Microsoft SenderID online tool I got an output that my SPF record is correct like you read below the output that poped up from Microsoft’s page:

Sender ID Framework SPF Record Wizard

Step 2 of 4: Display Published DNS Records

The wizard has checked DNS for information about prize.bgÂ including: SPF, MX and A records. This information is displayed below.

If an SPF record was found, you can verify its contents here and use the remaining steps of this wizard to modify the record if necessary. If no SPF record was found, you can use information from the domain’s MX and A records to create a new SPF record.

Click Next to continue.

SPF Record Found
One or more functional SPF record(s) have been found for the domain mydomain.com
The full text of the domain’s SPF record is as follows.

v=spf1 a -all

Another tool which helped me a lot in debugging problems with my SPF records is found on the address http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html so it might be wise to use it as well in order to check that your SPF records are correct.

Tags: Bind, bind dns, change, Click, com, consequence, content technologies, Display, DNS, domain names, file, filter mail, FoundMicrosoft, information, ip4, Junk, junk filter, mail account, mail domain, mail folder, mail providers, mail servers, Microsoft, microsoft mail, MSN, page, proper mail server, record dns, sender id, server messages, service providers, SPF, spf record, SPFs, text, tool, TXT, url address, wizard
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

Posts Tagged ‘TXT’

Daily Bible quote

GET ARTICLE UPDATES

Useful blog? Help it:

Links to Other Places

Recent Posts

Ads

Categories

About Myself

Recent Comments

Top Post Views

blogtopsites