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Sometimes I see this mailru-verification DNS record.

I've Googled - and Yandexed ;) - but I found nothing about it.

I suspected that is a kind of russian SPF implementation...

dig example.com TXT

outputs

; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-3ubuntu0.8-Ubuntu <<>> example.com TXT
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 56090
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com.    IN  TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com. 14400 IN  TXT "v=spf1 include:xxxxxx.xx -all"
example.com. 14400 IN  TXT "mailru-verification: xxxxxxxxx"
example.com. 14400 IN  TXT "spf2.0/pra include:xxxxxxx.xx -all"

;; Query time: 78 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.1.1#53(127.0.1.1)
;; WHEN: Sat Apr 02 12:36:52 CEST 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 210

Does someone know something about it? Thanks!

nulll
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    Apparently mail.ru has a statistics/problem notification service that a domain's postmaster can sign up for: https://postmaster.mail.ru I assume they will require you to verify your ownership of a domain by adding a `mailru-verification` header provided by them to your DNS zone. – n.st Apr 02 '16 at 11:07

4 Answers4

3

I suspect it's used for domain ownership verification when signing up for some SaaS-style service where you're allowed to use your own domain name.

This is fairly common practice to thwart abuse, and in such cases no one but that service provider is expected to actually make use of the record.

Presumably this one is for some service provided by mail.ru, based on the mailru bit in the value.

Håkan Lindqvist
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It's domain verification for service PostMaster.mail.ru. There you can get some statistics about your letters delivery, spam, problems, configure feedback loop and so on. Quite handsome.

If you have big audience with @mail.ru addresses you may find it useful for you. It has an interface in English too.

Eugene Lisitsky
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TXT records are kind of a description for the entry. One can write whatever he wants in these entries. This is mostly for internal use and does not affect the ip/name resolution.

See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXT_record

moestly
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    TXT records are also used for mail autentication sandard protocols (SPF, SenderID, DKIM, DMARC) – nulll Apr 02 '16 at 13:20
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Interesting, but even the official Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) domain amazonses.com has mailru-verification and also google-site-verification DNS TXT records which are used to verify site ownership (and get email delivery statistics from Mail.ru and Gmail):

nslookup -type=TXT amazonses.com
amazonses.com   text = "mailru-verification: 71ab435de908d6ed"
amazonses.com   text = "google-site-verification=aOJq8aXEtCO23r176f6iOTGt-RVuPv81XPtBuIzRTx0"
amazonses.com   text = "v=spf1 ip4:199.255.192.0/22 ip4:199.127.232.0/22 ... -all"
Vlad Rudenko
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