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Mailchimp

by | Mar 23, 2025 | evilzenscientist

Went into Mailchimp and did some much needed cleanup.

Archived some 50% of the mailing list that had unsubscribed.

I need to dig more into the platform, it’s been neglected for too long.

Pigskin Fumbleball

by | Dec 4, 2024 | evilzenscientist

I’ve been using this term to describe football, aka American football, aka gridiron, for many many many years.

I was surprised that there were zero hits on either Google or Bing search for this term.

This is absolutely a blog post to make sure it gets indexed 😀

MySQL PaaS

by | Aug 29, 2024 | evilzenscientist

Today was the end of my experiment with MySQL PaaS in Azure.

To be honest – performance, metrics and security were as described. Private connectivity within the virtual network, horizontal and vertical scaling, great metrics.

I got burned twice.

Once with a “potential bug” that burned $65k of Azure spend in a few hours (that was eventually refunded!), more recently with the Azure portal throwing errors continually.

 image

I’ve exported the data, reimported to an IaaS MySQL/MariaDB instance – and moved on.

Enabling DKIM and DMARC in Office365

by | Jan 13, 2024 | evilzenscientist

This turned out to be really simple; and there are some really good tools and docs at https://dmarcian.com/

  • set up DKIM DNS records
    • CNAME selector1._domainkey –> selector1-{domain}._domainkey.{office365domain}.onmicrosoft.com
    • CNAME selector2._domainkey –> selector2-{domain}._domainkey.{office365domain}.onmicrosoft.com
  • set up DMARC DNS records
    • TXT _dmarc –> correct DMARC policy

Then enable DKIM signing in the Defender portal https://security.microsoft.com

Email and Collaboration –> Policies and Rules –> Threat Policies –> Email Authentication settings

  • select the domain, click on “sign messages for this domain with DKIM signatures”

It might take a while for the DNS records to propagate.

Finally test the DMARC and DKIM settings, I used the DMARC Record Checker https://dmarcian.com/domain-checker

If you end up looking to use DMARC reporting, and sending to a third party/alternate domain – you also need to set up DNS records in the receiving domain:

  • set up External Domain Verification (EDV) records in DNS
    • TXT {domain}._report._dmarc –> v=DMARC1