hi Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the US State Dept had a phone

number for journalists to contact. It has since been removed; the website now instructs: email PAPressDuty@state.gov.

I looked up the old State Dept phone number and called it. The voice recording told me the same thing: email PAPressDuty@state.gov.

this situation sounds like news itself. I wonder what influences resulted in it.

Monday I emailed. Didn't get a reply until yesterday.

The reply I got was (among other error message stuff that appears general/unhelpful): ": TLSA lookup error for stimson.state.gov:25"

i'm too outdated to know the answer in depth, but of course 25 is SMTP. TLSA is briefly mentioned at https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-fanf-dane-smtp-04.html from a websearch for "smtp tlsa". Looks like whatever server sent your reply was unable to verify the identity of the referenced mail server, because the DNS servers they contacted didn't validate it. This would most likely be an issue with the dns servers or maintenance of the domain, but is also possibly something malicious in the mail communication path. But I only glanced at the first paragraph of that document. Others on this list are more familiar with TLSA than I am. Be nice to know how accurate my reply is.

So I'm wondering if anyone can interpret the technical significance of such an error for me.

Predictable paint-by-numbers opinion blatherings by crazed and/or paid losers will be ignored.

Doug