We spend a lot of time at Buttondown looking at DNS records. This is admittedly a bummer for everyone involved, but a necessary one. We generally do so under the auspices of one of three goals:
- Helping new users set up their custom sending and hosting domains
- Identifying which service a potential or recently onboarded user is coming from, so we can tailor our onboarding instructions accordingly
- Debugging deliverability issues for existing customers
As you may be aware — if you've spent time doing similar things — there is an absolute plethora of tools out there that replicate the functionality of Unix commands like dig. This is because folks on a support team don't necessarily want to open the terminal every time they want to see why someone's CNAME is being flattened.
We standardized on Google's Dig tool, which has been around for approximately four hundred years, with the aesthetics to match, but is reliable, functional, and simple — especially compared to the legions of similar tools that gate their functionality behind some sort of lead magnet.
Then, whatever poor internal-services team at Google technically owns Dig accidentally took it offline a few weeks back. It's back up now, but it was a good reminder that our preferred tool was, ultimately, kind of flawed: missing a few things we wished it had, and — of course — owned by Google while being free, which is never a good sign.
So, on a rainy day last week, I built our own version, which we've been using happily ever since. It is completely free, and I encourage you, if you are the kind of sicko who finds this sort of thing interesting, to play around with it.
There are exactly two bits of functionality that we bolted onto the pre-Google experience.
The first is defaulting to an ANY query, so that we get back every record type at once without having to tab between them.
The second, and perhaps more exciting one, is that we do some fairly basic lookups and cross-referencing between name servers and various records to also surface which services can be detected from a domain based solely on its DNS records. It saves us time when we're trying to figure out which documentation to send a customer, or that sort of thing.
If you'd be interested in us open-sourcing this, please email me — the biggest barrier to doing so is a vague sense that it's not worth the effort, and you telling me otherwise is the easiest way to change my mind.