Email is one of those core technologies that even most people who aren’t tech savvy are still comfortable with on a basic level. So why is it so hard to diagnose and troubleshoot it when you have trouble? Especially if you’re in the midst of implementing or auditing SPF, DKIM, or DMARC, it can be tough to dissect and find the information you need.
Enter AboutMy.email, a basic website designed to receive an email from your sending infrastructure and analyze it for deliverability, compliance, and design. The site is sponsored by email marketing optimization company Word to the Wise, so it’s underlying purpose really seems to be geared towards helping email marketers ensure that their messages land in inboxes, but it’s simplicity and diagnostic usefulness for technology folks is impressive. If that’s not good enough, did I mention it’s both fast and free?
Getting Started
Start off by visiting aboutmy.email. The landing page is just a randomized email address. Send an email to this address from the infrastructure you want to analyze. In this example, the address is part.puma.kind@aboutmy.email like below:
If you’re following along, try forwarding some junk mail that has a lot of links and images… that’ll give you more to explore.
Once you send the mail, you’ll see the SMTP conversation that happens between your sending mail transfer agent (MTA) and the receiving MTA at aboutmy.email:
After the session completes, you’ll then see a summary:
At a glance, this summary tells you whether your sending infrastructure’s SPF and DKIM are aligned and the status of the DMARC implementation. In this example, we can see that I’m not compliant with the Yahoo/Google requirements for mass mail senders. While this doesn’t impact me personally, if I were on a school account this could have an impact if I have any bulk senders. My district primarily leverages third-party sending infrastructure for mass notifications, so in my environment this lack of compliance wouldn’t concern me.
Going Deeper
If you used this for nothing more, it would be a great tool. However, there are additional functions that help you dive deeper into analyzing your message. Here’s a quick, non-comprehensive blast of features:
See the sources and stats of remote content embedded in the message:
See a list of external links found in the message:
Examine the SPF/DKIM/DMARC policies, and see how they were evaluated. If these topics are still very foreign to you, this can help make them more concrete. In the example below, we can see that the SPF policy for this sender requires sending from (among other ranges), the 17.58.0.0/16 range. The message was received from 17.58.23.196, so we can see it passes.
Check for industry practices that large mailbox providers like to see:
Checkout the raw message payload:
View message headers in a friendly format:
View details about the images included in the message:
View the rendered images in the message:
There are some additional features, but the uses above are things I can see using for troubleshooting on a regular basis. It’s a bit out of the use case, but in a pinch I can also see using this as a tool to investigate potentially malicious emails. For example, if I have a user who receives a hinky email, they could forward the email to an aboutmy.email address I’m monitoring, and while I wouldn’t be able to see details about the original sender, I could still use it to examine the external sources, links, and images.