Check mail settings for an external service

[potemkin_ai]

I faced an issue when during the domains registrar change I've got my SendGrid records vanished from the DNS records.

I was looking at the mail settings verification and since it was telling it's Ok, I believed it's checking if appropriate records are valid even when external service is enabled, which turned out to be wrong.

Probably it would be nice to add to CloudRon a check for the SPF/DKIM records if outbound e-mail is configured at all?

[girish]

Currently, we just have SMTP integration. This needs more of an API integration depending on the provider.

[timconsidine]

@potemkin_ai you probably do something like this already, but in case useful for others, I use spftoolbox (https://spftoolbox.com) which I installed as a LAMP app from their Github.

I get that it's not integrated in the way you're suggesting but for infrequent searches, it does the job. For me anyway.

Dozens of alternatives of course e.g. mxtoolbox (https://mxtoolbox.com/)

[potemkin_ai]

@girish asking that would be too much; I'm only speaking about checking the existence of the necessary records, not even the value of them

[potemkin_ai]

@timconsidine thank you!
And you are right - in every trouble I'm always looking how the tool could help me to avoid spending time, as that makes it more valuable - so I decided to share it as a feedback here.

[girish]

@potemkin_ai not 100% sure but I think that sendgrid generates a subdomain and we can get this subdomain only via the API (and then the subdomain can be checked against DNS).

[potemkin_ai]

@girish hmm... yes, that's correct.
What about scanning for CNAMEs then? Smth like

checkDNSForCnames() {
get all DNS records
grep CNAME
grep $service_name
}

followed by:

if $outboundSMTP is enabled
and checkDNSForCnames() is false
then displayMessage "your mail configuration provider seems to be misconfigured and your e-mails might be rejected."

?

[girish]

@potemkin_ai possibly, have to investigate more about that approach. Each provider has their own way of setting up DNS though so I suspect it's error prone (or maybe this is all standardized by now). We use postmark and don't use any of this CNAME records. IIRC, they don't need SPF (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/why-we-no-longer-ask-for-spf-records).

BTW, I just left a note for myself with the comment that it would be nice to do an API integration. It wasn't an argument against your request. We are open to integrating with relay providers via API. This has the advantage that we can also get proper delivery reports for each mail via API as well.

[potemkin_ai]

@girish that would be the best way, actually - having error codes from the service provider would help me to understand the DNS records are missing even earlier