Last weekend two MxToolBox employees ran in the Austin, TX Capitol 10,000 (10K) Race. This was the 35th Annual event with over 30,000 participants. Douglas Branham, Operations Manager and Brian Crawford, Support Analyst trained for months leading up to the event.
We applaud your hard work and for representing our company well!
On our MxWatch Server Monitor we have aggregated all of our user data and Blacklist results into two informational graphs on our new Dashboard. As a benefit of providing this information, we noticed both a rise in listings for today as well as an increase for the Realtime Black List (RBL) Mailspike. Note, we also saw a rise for Truncate, Spamhaus, Lashback & CBL. It seems like yesterday was a big activity day for RBLs.
We were intrigued, so we did a bit of digging. We didn’t find anything on the Internet or on Twitter, so we reached out directly to Mailspike. They quickly responded (nice Customer Service!) and let us know that they have been making a few upgrades. They have upgraded their “infrastructure to be able to deal with more data and they added/improved algorithms for zero hour detection and bulk listing of highly compromised IPs inside dynamic network ranges.”
Oh and by the way Mailspike, we love your Live Traffic Monitor. That’s a really cool idea!
As always, we thank you for using our Server Monitoring tools and for reading our blog! If anyone has any further details on any of these Blacklists and the activity, contact us at feedback@mxtoolbox.com.
MxToolBox has provided Free DNS Tools, including MxWatch Server Monitoring since 2003. Since then we have been pushing hard to improve your experience with our tools and in the last year we overhauled MxWatch to a new look and feel. Today we are excited to release a new and improved MxWatch Dashboard. We want to emphasize that this is merely a new look for the MxWatch system; nothing behind the scenes in how the tool works will be changed during this launch.
Tag/Alert View
The Tag/Alert View on the left is helpful to quickly view the status of your alerts. If there was an issue a red or yellow flag would float next to the respective tag. You can quickly make updates to your Tags using the Manage Tags button. Tags are very similar to Google Labels, or Outlook folders. The idea is that you can “tag” an alert for quick reference and to help you remember what service you are monitoring. You can also group alerts together using tags if you want an overview of multiple systems. If you need more help with Tags, view our helpful video on the Manage Tags page.
If you are not comfortable with the Tag View you can also use the alternate Alert View, which is very similar to the old My Alerts page.
Alert History Visualization
Our Engineers have added a new tool that quickly shows the most recent issues for your monitors. If an orange square falls under a date, that means there was an issue. Simply click the orange square for more information.
What’s Down
The What’s Down button replaces the My Alerts button and defaults to showing you what is down as opposed to all of your alerts. If you would like to view all of your alerts, simply uncheck the box ‘Show only down’ and all alerts will be shown.
History
The History button replaces the Alert History button. Click this to see a concise and quick history of your monitors.
If you haven’t signed up for a Free Monitoring account, we urge you to give it a try! Go here. If you are return user, please logon and check out the new Dashboard.
Our Engineers are continually working on this service to further improve it’s functionality and ease of use. We are very interested in your feedback on the MxWatch Dashboard and we urge you to send us your ideas for improvement as well. Please feel free to reach out to us at feedback@mxtoolbox.com.
People all around the world rely on our Super Tool (Blacklist Lookup) and our MxWatch Email Server Monitoring services on a daily basis to let them know if they have network problems. We wanted to help shed a little light on blacklisting and what that means for you and your business. We hope to answer a few common questions that we’ve recently received:
Q: Are Blacklists credible organizations?
A: Some are; some are not.
Q: Is MxToolBox a credible organization?
A: Absolutely! We are here to help you understand blacklists and how they can affect your business. We also understand how time consuming they can be and we are here to offer you a solution!
Q: Does inclusion of a blacklist on the MxToolBox Super Tool have any effect on my email delivery?
A: Absolutely not. We simply report that your IP Address is listed. The effect that it has on your email is 100% dependent on the recipients who choose to use said blacklist as a spam-filter on their email servers. For instance, if your IP is in the blacklist database and the recipient uses it as a filter; your emails will likely bounce and they won’t accept them. If your IP is not listed, your mail should be accepted in the majority of cases. This also doesn’t mean the recipient server won’t mark you as “Spam” based on content. If that’s the case, keep in mind your email was still accepted by the recipient server.
Q: Does inclusion of a blacklist on the MxToolBox Super Tool advocate the use of a blacklist?
A: Absolutely not. Again, we are simply here to report the data of the blacklist databases. For blacklists that have a bad reputation for the listing criteria and/or delisting protocol, the problem is not that MxToolBox reports the data; we are here to help alert you. The problem is the organizations that choose to use said Blacklists as a tool despite their [the blacklists] poor reputations. We’re here to help you understand that and to make recommendations on how to solve the problems!
A good example is the NOMOREFUNN Blacklist whose website is currently down. We are aware of the NOMOREFUNN site issue; However, their database is still returning positive results and we will continue to provide those results as long as they are active.
The number one thing about which you need to be concerned is whether or not there is any effect on your outbound mail delivery. If you are getting bounced or returned messages or your recipients are not getting your messages, then you should be concerned that you have a bigger problem at hand. Most blacklists can be contacted for removal once you’re cleared up any issues in your network.
Regardless of what is causing the problem, MxToolBox can offer you a solution that includes Spam & Virus Protection with Outbound Blacklist Managment. If you run your own email server, we can offer you Emergency Mail. If you are hosted and are looking for a bigger, better and more secure environment, we can provide Email Hosting, MxToolBox Supported Google Apps for Business & Microsoft Office 365. No matter which service you choose, MxToolBox is going to take care of your email.
Please feel free to contact our Customer Care Team by emailing sales@mxtoolbox.com or simply call 1-866-MxToolBox (698-6652) with any questions or to learn how you can put the Blacklist issue behind you forever!
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Copyright 2012 MxToolbox Inc. 12710 Research Blvd. Austin, TX 78759
A few weeks ago we started receiving notices that the NOMOREFUNN Realtime Black List (RBL) website was down. We’ve been monitoring their site for a few weeks and their website remains down however the RBL database itself is up and taking queries. Unfortunately we don’t have any details as to why/when the site went down.
Although the website remains down, the RBL list is answering and is being maintained. Due to the RBL List still answering and showing in an active state, we will not be removing this list from our tool at this time.
MxToolBox is not affiliated with any Blacklists nor does inclusion on our tool advocate the use of any specific lists. We simply provide a public tool that can be utilized to see if you are on a Blacklist. If you are on a Blacklist, or more importantly, if you are having problems with your email delivery and you’re not getting the help you expect from the blacklists themselves or the recipients to which you cannot send; MxToolBox has a Solution! MxToolBox offers Blacklist Protection! For more information please feel free to visit our website or email info@mxtoolbox.com. You can always call 866-MxToolBox (698-6652) and ask to speak to any of our blacklist specialists for assistance or to learn more about our solutions.
We’re always looking for new Blacklists to add to our tools. If you have one you would like to suggest, please send an email to support@mxtoolbox.com.
For information about other Blacklists that have shut down or Blacklists that are having problems, view this forum post.