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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/infosec@infosec.pub

Before sharing my email address with some person or some org, I do an MX DNS lookup on the domain portion of their email address. It’s usually correct. That is, if the result is not of the form *.mail.protection.outlook.com, then that recipient is not using Microsoft’s mail server.

But sometimes I get stung by an exception. The MX lookup for one recipient yielded barracudanetworks.com, so I trusted them with email. But then they sent me an email and I saw a header like this:

Received: from *.outbound.protection.outlook.com (*.outbound.protection.outlook.com…

Is there any practical way to more thoroughly check whether an email address leads to traffic routing through Microsoft (or Google)?

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[-] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

Well, in that case I guess I should target Barracuda, Proofpoint, and MX Logic in the same way, since 90+% of the world is on MS or Google platforms. That’s probably my practical answer.. to distrust any MX servers that are known to be proxies. So, I need a list of proxies like that.

this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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