The Best Email Health Checkup

Email is one of those inventions that have been quite a game changer in terms of marketing. Email marketing is now in the strategy list of every company or business houses. The sales group of an organization works really hard, spending their quality time and at the same time investing money to generate leads. These leads are their future customers who will buy the products or services from them. Email marketing is the process where the sales team sends email to the email list and wait for the responses by the recipient. This is building the loyal; customer base.

With every good technology there are also certain things that comes on the way and in the case of email marketing, it is the unhealthy emails that might ruin the whole campaign. Now how do you know whether your email ID is healthy or unhealthy? This is one question that we as a business houses or sales team must question ourselves. This is because it directly is connected to your customers.

There are tons of emails IDs and not every email ID is a healthy one. There are several Ids that are unhealthy. The drawbacks of an email Id becoming unhealthy is that it might end up being black listed. Once your email ID gets black listed your email deliverability reduces and your reputation. You can check using email health checker.

There are several factors that affect the health of your email ID.

• Hard Bounces
• Spam Trap Hits
• Inactive Recipients
• Un subscribers
• Complaints

The issue here is that, even if you are facing the above problem, it is quite difficult for you to find it out as your Email Id will not be showing any signs and it will work absolutely fine until you end up in the email black list. The answer lies in SPF, DMARC and MX DNS record.

SPF DNS record (sender policy frame work record)

What do you mean by SPF DNS record?

SPF or a sender policy frame work is a process of authentication for emails which enables the Email to prevent forgery of sender ID when the email is being delivered, which is also known as Spoofing.

Cybercriminals use these techniques to do a phishing and email spam. In this illegitimate process, the cybercriminals replaces the header of the sender and pretends to be someone else. This increases their chances for the email to get open. These crimes are very easy to execute and quite effective. Email spoofing accounts for the 90% of the data breaches.

SPF DNS record comes very handy in such situation. It prevents the cybercriminals or the spammers who sends forged emails. The email server of the recipient can check whether the email that is send is send by an authorized IP address.  The record is available in the domain’s DNS zone file.

How to set up an SPF DNS record?

• Step 1 – You need to find out the list of email servers that you actually want to authorize to send emails
• Step 2 – This is where you have the list of IP addresses and it’s the perfect time to create actual SPF DNS record. SPF record starts with v=spf1 and ends with –all.

Example: v=spf1 ip4:114.233.31.227 –all

In the end the –all signifies that the servers are not listed in the SPF record and are not allowed or authorized to send emails.

• Step 3 – In this step the new record is saved and allowed to propagate

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)

What is DMARC?

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is the process that allows the email domain owners to prevent their emails domains from cybercriminals who uses the techniques of email spoofing.  Here, there are certain rules specified by the domain owners with the DNS entry and this is to authenticate the emails.

There are certain drawbacks in the older methods which are taken care here in this DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). Here in this method, the sends and the receivers can share information based on the working authentication mechanism.

In the year 2012, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) was created by PayPal. Since then the users of this method has been increasing. Some of the popular contributors to these methods are as follows:

• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• Google
• Yandex,
• AOL
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn etc.

How to set up a DMARC?

• Step 1 – In this first step you need to add anew TXT DNS record after login to your Domain.
• Step 2 – Here in this step you need to enter the DNS record that you want. This will start with v=DMARC1

Example: “v=DMARC1; p=reject; pct=100; rua=mailto:[email protected]”. You can check the below table to get an idea of DMARC tags.

• Step 3 – In this step the new record is saved and allowed to propagate

MX DNS record

What do you mean by MX DNS record?

MX DNS record or Mail Exchange DNS record enables the domain owner to handle a domain email messages. This is a tyope of resource record. It also has the following with the process:

• SOA – Start of Authority
• NS – Name Servers
• OP Addresses (A and AAAA)
• PTR – Pointers for Reverse DNS lookups
• CNAME – Domain Name Aliases

How can you set up a MX DNS record?

• Step 1 – The first step is to edit the DNS record that you want to set up
• Step 2 – This is where you create a new MX record
• Example: 0 mail.example.com

The MX record’s priority is the initial number and the server is “mail.example.com” is the email that will accept the email messages.

If both the MX records have the same priority, randomly one server will be selected.

• Step 3 – In this step the new record is saved and allowed to propagate

What do you mean by Email Blacklist?

When the DNS record is misconfigured, in that case the IP address or the domain can be blacklisted in one or more email blacklists. An Email Blacklist is that list of email domains and IP addresses that are known to send spam. These lists are very helpful for the companies and organizations to filter out the spam.

The one issue that you might face if you do not configure your DNS record properly is that you might be an easy target for cybercriminals who can spoof or conduct phishing attack. This will lead your domain to get blacklisted. With the help of an Email Health Checker you can actually check whether the email ID has been blacklisted or not.

How to fix Email Blacklisting?

From email blacklisting you need to remove your IP address or your domain name. For that the first thing that you need to do is to know the reason of your email getting into the blacklist. This indicates you to fix your DNS records. Then you need to go through the removal process and end the operators a request.

After that, you need to screen and check from time to time so that you do not suffer from such attack in the future.

FREE DNS REPORT TOOL BY DNS-HEALTH.COM

WebBoosts.com has launched a free DNS report tool DNS-Health. This wonder tool enables the domain owners and site owners to check the health of the domain names through DNS record. There are several tasks that DNS-Health does:

• Provides domain Names information
• Domain Names parent servers
• SOA Records
• MX Records
• SPF Records

One thing that makes this one very effective and popular as it never charges its users the status of DNS record. The whole service is free.  This is developed by WebBoost a webmaster community.

Some of the DNS record entries in a DNS check are:

• Parent Server Record
• DNS Glue Issues
• SOA Records
• SOA Serial Numbers
• SOA Refresh
• SOA Retry
• SOA Expire
• SOA Minimum TTL
• MX Record
• SPF Records
• Mismatched Records
• Various IP addresses related records
• Name Servers Records

For checking the DNS health for trouble shooting there are many tools and the finest 9 are mentioned below:

DNS issue is a huge on from business perspective. There are certain DNS issues that might actually bring the whole business down. This becomes very critical if you do not restore it. That is why DNS health test tools are so popular among the companies and so handy. Following are some of the finest tools for checking the DNS health for trouble shooting:

DNS Checker Tools

• Uptrends
• DNS Report
• DNS Spy
• DNS Watch
• Intro DNS
• Ultra Tools
• DNS Query
• MXTOOLBOX
• Dig

1. Uptrends

Uptrend is one of the popular tools that enable you to find the DNS report instantly. It is very useful when any changes have been made. You can also check if the new changes are propagates on the internet or not. These are some of the DNS records that are that can be found using this particular tool:

• SOA (Start of Authority)
• NS (Name Server)
• A/AAAA
• MX (Mail Exchanger)
• TXT (Text)

2. DNS Report

This is another popular DNS record that let you know the DSN report that contains:

• Parent
• SOA (Start of Authority)
• NS (Name Server)
• MX
• Mail
• WWW
• SPF
• DNSSEC

3. DNS Spy

With the help of DNS spy you can test 4 important metrics of Domain. Here are these 4 matrices:

• Connectivity – The availability of the names servers that are configured and are responding to DNS query.
• Performance – To Calculate the response time
• Resilience & Security – In case of multiple name servers, it can verify the resilience and CAA (Certificate Authority Authorization)
• DNS Record – Issues relating to TTL Value, MX, root, SOA and IPV6.

4. DNS Watch

DNS watch is another very popular tool to check DNS record. It is also very convenient to use and lightweight tool. You can check a record, MX, NS, SOA and TXT.

5. Into DNS

If you want to check the health of a site’s DNS configuration then this tool is very effective. It also provides you with detailed report and plans that you can execute after the check.

6. Ultra Tools

For finding out DNS performance information this is the perfect tool that you can use. For trouble shoot performance related issues Ultra tools is the best option.

7. DNS Query

This process is very effective because DNS query traversal tool provides step by step routing traversal details. All the information is provided in response time.

8. MTX toolbox

MTX tool box provides hundreds of performance related tests. For looking up blacklist this is another perfect tool.

9. Dig

Available on a UNIX-Based operating System, dig is one of the most popular tools in the business.

Below is a simple query output:

Here is an example to get  MX record:

These were the top 9 tools that will help you to get over DNS troubleshoot issues.