November Newsletter – Third Time is the Charm! Welcome to the Third Edition of our Top Holiday Email Related Tools

At MxToolBox, we use many email tools on a daily basis and sometimes we forget to share the wealth. We asked everyone in the office to give us their favorite Email related tool. We’ve done this for two years now, so you may want to check out the 2009 & 2010 results as well. Here’s the list!

Keep in mind that this list is not in any particular order but is just a sampling of our favorites. If you have any tools in mind that we missed, please let us know!

Mailflow Monitoring – Last year we recommended our Server Monitoring to help take the guessing out of server management. Earlier this year we released our Mailflow monitoring which is design to test your server end-to-end to detect problems that most monitoring services miss. We understand that even short email delays can be costly for your business. Our solution provides complete mail flow visibility by detecting issues with inbound or outbound mailflow.
Send Test Email– This tool is from Wormly and is pretty cool. All you have to do is enter your SMTP server and then a sender and recipient. Then just hit the button and it shows you the SMTP conversation.
Traceroute– We’ve had this one on our list for a couple of years now. This year, we’ve found a new tool that does all the work for you! Traceroute tracks the path that a packet takes from your computer to a destination address. A traceroute also shows how many times your packets are being rebroadcast by other servers until it gets to the final destination.
DNS Check – This tool can help troubleshoot potential problems with your domain, web and DNS. It checks each step in the chain that links hostname to IP address. If it finds a problem, it flags for attention.
Sender Score – This tool is a free email reputation service that can give an indication of the trustworthiness of an email source. The list is complied by Return Path and may help you pinpoint if you have a sender reputation problem.
Quick Zone Check – Performs a series of checks on your name servers and email servers. Returns WHOis, MX, Name Server and more info all in one place.
Blacklist Monitoring & Delisting Support – The MxToolBox Blacklist Tool checks your IP against a list of over 150 Real Time Blacklists. We also now offer Blacklist monitoring and Delisting Support.

Last but not least, we would like to include three of our own Free Tools which help make troubleshooting, diagnosing, and monitoring your email easier. We have been providing our free tools since 2003 and we are proud to continue giving back to the email community.
Blacklist Lookup– The MxToolBox Blacklist Tool checks your IP against a list of over 150 Real Time Blacklists. If your mail server has been blacklisted, some email you send may not be delivered.
ping@mxtoolbox.com – MxToolBox Ping is one of the Free Tools provided by MxToolBox to help you determine if Inbound and Outbound mail flow is working. Simply send an email from your network to ping@mxtoolbox.com and the tool will look at the email headers of your message and send you a notification back immediately. Please note that the subject and body do not matter. The response email will include several helpful troubleshooting tools including your Outbound IP, server hops, any transaction times or delays and it can help trace the route your email is taking to discover any outbound gateways you might be using.
MxToolBox Free Tools – We mentioned this tool last year but once again we have made some updates! All the familiar tools you are using on a daily basis are still there but we have added Ping, Trace, SOA, TCP, HTTP and HTTPS. These have also been added to our Server Monitoring so you can monitor those commands as well.