Anybody here use Fasthosts?

I've been trying to add DKIM email verification to my domain.. got the private key set up on my server for the domain (hosted on a VPS), I should add that I already have DKIM working on 2 other domains I host myself...

So I go to the Fasthosts advanced domain control panel, try to add a TXT record with my key, and it spits out an error. By trial and error I've deduced that the string appears to be too long to be added- which is a big pity because I need all the string to be a valid DKIM key.

Anybody have experience setting this up? It's likely gonna serve me right for using Fasthosts in the first place innit... I've opened a support ticket with them detailing the problem, but I wondered if somebody here would know (Google doesn't seem to know either),

Cheers

Sorted it by myself but proved Fasthosts tech support are blinking useless!

I kept quiet on this one as I don't use Fasthosts and didn't have anything helpful to say :D If you fancied pointing me in the direction of a decent DKIM setup tutorial though...? ;)

DKIM is actually a lot simpler than it seems when you first approach it.

What it is is a pair of keys. One is a private key which your email server 'signs' all your outgoing mail with. It does this by taking the content of the message and hashing it against the private key stored on the server. The other key, the public one, is stored in a TXT record in your server's DNS record. The receiving email server then retrieves the public key from your DNS record and checks it against what it receives in the email. If they agree, then your server is validated as the source. Simples, right?

I run my own server under my own steam (I install everything, run backups, install programs etc myself) so have to configure everything myself. It's been an experience, shall we say!

So, I've got postfix, courier and opendkim installed on the server. I use a tool called opendkim-genkey to generate a keypair (opendkim-genkey -d DOMAINNAME - where DOMAINNAME is your email domain name)... this then outputs two files - default.private & default.txt.

default.private is the file to point opendkim at so it knows how to sign your outgoing emails.
default.txt is the file which contains the public key.

Now, here is where I ran into a problem with Fasthosts DNS control panel.

This is what the public key file looked like:

default._domainkey IN TXT "v=DKIM1; g=*; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDu6fqHzrYk WhpWLz/6NO1/aBNP0BNuNTlYBFpJhapl2SMoFSFZD+c/TqHIzAWRfbZKo0bTwFofF0fjcJp6lzn4qcY4wwbbBIdTQcCgYB bZCzNJcNV8MPUcLqB35ppvR1n3/U9ApFEkvOtLqINmWB9rdLpMopY1fgPJy0IWrcDkowIDAQAB" ;

I was trying to put the whole of the text into my DNS control panel TXT record field. Doh! What I should have been doing was this:

set the hostname part of the record to default._domainkey and put everything between quotes in the TXT field of the record.

See? Simples, I told you!

And now, my mail-tester.com test result is 10/10 :D

Ah. It's easy on Linux.

Windows Server here :(

No SPF?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Marc J

No SPF?

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Yes of course, but any excuse bulk email buckets like AOHELL can dream up to stop mail being delivered need to be countered. I'm just dotting every 'i' & crossing every 't' that's all.

A lesson to be learned here is that hosting things yourself on a bare server to save a bit of cash is a waste of money. I'm on a rolling monthly contract & will soon migrate to a service I don't have to manage myself.