Monthly Archives: July 2015

Email Extractor

Have you ever needed to parse an text to get a list of email addresses?  Maybe recent users need to be notified of a change and their email information is in an unstructured log file?  Maybe marketing handed you a text dump and you need real emails for their campaign?

Regardless of your project, you have a choice: you can spend time writing your own parsing scripts or, now, you can use MxToolbox…

Introducing our Email Extraction tool!

EE_menu

Located on our “More” Tools page, Email Extraction can save you time and energy when you need a list of email addresses, or domains quickly from unstructured text.

How does it work?

EE_interface

Pasting an email from a recent email campaign.

Email Extraction takes any text (in the case below I’ve used a recent email campaign) and automatically parses out the emails.  You have several options on how you would like the output:

  • Omit Duplicates – Consolidates all duplicate email addresses into one entry
  • Hide Counts – Removes the Count column (see image below)
  • Sort Emails – Sorts the email addresses in the order in which they appear in the text
  • Only Domain – Trims the list to only the domains of the email addresses.
EE_results

Results of the Email Extractor

Let us know how you like it!

DNS Batch Tool

Have you ever needed to lookup DNS on a large list of IPs?  How about parsing a security log to see where a potential threat is coming from?  Combing through the log and getting the full list of IPs can be tedious and tiresome.  And, then you still have to run the DNS checks one-by-one or write a script to do it for you.

Or, you could come to MxToolbox where we have all the cool tools…

That’s right, we’ve launched a DNS Batch Lookup Tool that does all that for you.  Available to all MxToolbox Professional users, DNS Batch Tool eliminates the time-consuming work of parsing text for IP addresses and repetitive DNS lookups.

You can find it on the main menu of the MxToolbox Professional interface* along with our premium monitors like DNS Zone Protect and MailFlow Monitoring.

DNSBatch_link

DNS Batch Tool provides takes simple text as the main input.

DNSBatch_home

As, you can see below, I’ve copied an entire email into the tool so I can see lookup routing information for my most recent campaign.  I could also use security logs or a pre-generated list of IP addresses.

DNSBatch_hometext

DNS Batch Tool parses the text file and automatically extracts all the IP addresses.

DNSBatch_extract

 

Processing these IP addresses yields reverse host name, country, region and city information, AS number and AS name.

DNSBatch_results

 

Note: you must be a paid user to access MxToolbox Professional.

Random Password Generator

Websites, servers, systems and pc’s all require passwords.  Most people reuse the same password without thought, but that’s not a good practice in this day of data breaches.  To prevent easy hacks, most sites require passwords fit a certain schema: capital letters, special characters, numbers, etc.  Some require a longer passwords to make a cracking a password more difficult.  Creating these can be difficult as can remembering a password you created on the spur of the moment.

Password Generator

Fortunately, MxToolbox has created a handy random password generator that enables you to create passwords that meet three different levels of security:

  • Easy to Remember – Creates passwords 8 characters long in a standard schema with a capital Letter, lower case letters and 2 numbers.  These passwords alternate consonants and vowels to make them easier to remember.
  • Stronger – Creates slightly longer passwords (10 characters) with a capital letter, special characters and numbers.
  • Very Strong – Passwords in this category are 14 characters long and use multiple capital letters, numbers and special characters in a truly random configuration.

Don’t like the 5 options we provide?  Click the “Generate More” button until you find a password you like.  Now that you can quickly generate a strong password, you just need a way to remember it!

 

How do I test my DNS resolution?

DNS setup and resolution is important for your on-going business.  Without properly configured DNS, your customers cannot find you online.  It’s a pretty common story: You setup a new server and configure the DNS and you can see it on your network, but can anyone else get to your server?   Everything isn’t setup and running until you check DNS resolution with an external 3rd party.

Free Tools

Fortunately, MxToolbox provides free tools that allow you to check your DNS resolution externally, so you can verify what your customers see.

Our DNS Lookup tool will return all the authoritative A records for a domain.  This is useful to ensure basic DNS configuration.

Our SuperTool contains a number of useful DNS lookups.  Most often our users check on DNS records for mail like MX, SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.  However, we support the most common DNS lookups, including A, AAAA (for IPv6), PTR, SOA, TXT, LOC and others.supertool

SuperTool also includes a lookup (DNS:) for all the name servers authoritative to your domain so you can see them all at-a-glance.  This lookup includes an analysis of the name server configuration compared to relevant RFCs.dnslookup

MxToolbox Premium Services

A la carte, DNS monitoring with MxWatch Monitoring packages.

Starting at $20/month, you can setup custom DNS monitors for your systems and domains.  These monitors alert you immediately if a record changes or servers fail to respond.  Learn More.

Turn-key DNS monitoring with Domain Health Monitoring.

Domain Health analyzes your domain’s configuration and automatically creates the appropriate DNS, SMTP, and HTTP monitors for your domain.  You get one free Domain Health Monitor with an MxWatch Monitoring package.  Learn More

Comprehensive DNS Change Management and Security Monitoring with DNS Zone Protect.

Our latest product constantly scans  the entire DNS setup for your domain and alerts you when any change is made.  Unlike traditional DNS monitors, DNS Zone Protect can detect the addition of new subdomains that could be the start of a Domain Shadow attack.  Learn More.