Monthly Archives: June 2015

Reputation Lookup

Your domain’s reputation has become increasingly important to email deliverability, website accessibility, brand reputation and overall business performance.  No business can afford to ignore their domain’s online reputation.  Many companies, like Google and PhishTank, publish APIs to their online reputation databases, enabling businesses to check their online status or check the status of a website before accessing it.  However, researching and monitoring all these sites creates a lot of work.

Brand Reputation - Bad

A typical example of a domain with a poor online reputation.

Brand Reputation - Good

An example of a website with a good online reputation.

Fortunately, Mxtoolbox can help!  Our new Reputation Lookup tool provides you with a consolidated view of your domain’s online reputation.  On first release, our one-stop Reputation Lookup checks Google and PhishTank.  As we discover new reputation databases, these will be added to increase your insight into your online reputation.  Check out your domain in our tool!

Did DNS Propagate?

If you have multiple DNS servers, one of your biggest concerns is probably the propagation of changes across your pool of servers.  Once you make a change, add a record or remove a record is that record getting updated on all your servers?  Are you serving up the same records or is one server out of sync?   Are your registrar’s servers syncing your changes?

MxToolbox's DNS Propagation tool, available in Classic and Professional interfaces

MxToolbox’s DNS Propagation tool, available in Classic and Professional interfaces

MxToolbox is happy to announce our new DNS Propagation tool.  Our tool checks all of your DNS servers simultaneously when you lookup a record, compares the Start of Authority record to all servers and highlights the server(s) that are different.  In one lookup, you can view the propagation of your records across your entire DNS pool.

dnspropagation

A well-timed search for Google.com’s A record shows them in the process of propagation across servers.

Are your emails deliverable?

One of the biggest concerns in email marketing and online commerce is the deliverability of email.  Can you do business if the email server at your target customers refuses to accept your email?

There are many types of email deliverability rankings, some focus on marketing deliverability to specific customers, bulk email services or even online management of email reputation.  MxToolbox focuses on the fundamental questions of email function:

  • Are your email headers properly formed?
  • Is SPF configured properly?
  • Is DKIM configured?  And, what is the signature?
  • What’s the round trip processing time and for each hop in the email?

Our new Email Deliverability analysis tool provides insight into your email configuration which will help you ensure email delivery to your customers, prospects and business partners.

Email Deliverability Report

An example MxToolbox email deliverability report.

Looking Up ASN

Autonomous System Numbers or ASNs are provided by Internet registries to Internet Service Providers as a unique identifier of their network.  ISPs may have multiple networks and therefore multiple ASNs, one for each non-contiguous subnet, which may get confusing for network managers or customers, as you can see in this example below.  ASNs are also used to configure Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) between two networks or between two subnets.

ASN Lookup Example

Level 3 Communications owns multiple ASNs. With our tool, it’s easy to find the appropriate one for your project.

MxToolbox has developed an ASN Lookup Tool that takes an ISPs name and returns the ASNs they own. In addition, the tool can accept an ASN and return the name of the owner.  This tool can be useful for network managers working with large ISPs or trying to determine ownership of a particular ASN or attempting to setup BGP.