Category Archives: MxWatch

This blog is dedicated to our Server Monitoring product. Monitor your server for Blacklists, Up/Down SMTP, HTTP, TCP, MailFlow performance and more! http://mxtoolbox.com/services_servermonitoring.aspx

New Ping and Traceroute Tools available at MxToolbox.com

Today we’re happy to announce that we have added ICMP Ping and Traceroute to our Free Tools at mxtoolbox.com. Typically you would use a Windows Command Processor or Terminal shell to utilize Ping and Traceroute to help troubleshoot issues however it is often very useful to run these tools from a location other than where you are currently sitting, so we’ve added it to the arsenal of commands available on our site.

Ping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping)

Ping is a commonly used tool to test the reachability of a host (IP) and also measures the round trip time on the response.

NOTE: Don’t confuse the new ICMP ping tool with our ping@mxtoolbox.com email trace tool. Ping@mxtoolbox.com was created in the spirit of ICMP ping as a quick tool to test Inbound and Outbound mail flow on a server. For more details on ping@mxtoolbox.com, go here.


Traceroute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute)

Traceroute tracks the path that a packet takes from the source 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.

Along with our Free DNS Tools, we also offer Free Server Monitoring. Our MxWatch Monitoring will allow you to setup Monitors for Blacklists, SMTP and more. You will then be alerted via email or SMS text if there is an issue with a Monitor, which can help you address problems before they escalate. The Free version of our MxWatch includes two Monitors, which can be used to check the Blacklist every seven days or any other additional alerts of your choice; SMTP, TCP, HTTP, etc. We also offer Paid Services for those individuals that want to monitor more than two sites or servers.  Why choose the paid services? The MxWatch Basic package provides up to 10 Monitors as well as access to the Tier II expertise of our rock-star Support Team!

Here is the full list of available commands for our Free DNS Tools:

Command Explanation
blacklist: Check IP or host for reputation
smtp: Test mail server SMTP (port 25)
mx: DNS MX records for domain
a: DNS A record IP address for host name
spf: Check SPF records on a domain
txt: Check TXT records on a domain
ptr: DNS PTR record for host name
cname: DNS canonical host name to IP address
scan: Perform a port scan on the host
whois: Get domain registration information
arin: Get IP address block information
soa: Get Start of Authority record for a domain
tcp: Verify an IP Address allows tcp connections (tcp:ip:port)    New!
http: Verify an IP Address allows http connections (http:”url”:”regex”)    New!
https: Verify an IP Address allows secure connections (https:”url”:”regex”)    New!
ping: Perform a standard ICMP ping  New!
trace: Perform a standard ICMP trace route  New!


As always we thank everyone for their feedback on our tools, to reach out to us please email us at feedback@mxtoolbox.com.

New MxWatch (Server Monitoring) Dashboard Launched

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.

NOMOREFUNN Realtime Blacklist Website Having Issues

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.

Is Your Company in an Area with Severe Weather? Protect Your Company’s Email with Email Disaster Recovery with MxToolBox

To our friends that live in areas with frequent inclement weather: If your company server isn’t prepared for crazy weather, we can help! Our Emergency Email Continuity Product is designed to provide an inbound backup email platform. Our system works by creating a backup mailbox for each of your users that is constantly running. In the event of impending severe weather, you can have peace of mind that your email is safe. Our servers have unlimited mail spooling and will safely store your email until you are ready for it to be released.

Our Emergency Mail system even provides a natural “meeting place” for employees to regroup and collaborate after a widespread disaster when even the office is unavailable. The rich AJAX web client allows users to send and receive mail from their Zimbra mailbox from anywhere at anytime.

If you already have a Disaster Recovery system in place, kudos! But, are you Monitoring your Server for up/down activity? Our Server Monitoring can send you an automatic alert if there is an issue.

Please be safe! If you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to reach out to use at info@mxtoolbox.com or at (866)-MXTOOLBOX / (866)-698-6652.

Attack of Zeus, Win32/Zbot – Malware/Trojan Horse

We have noticed an uptick of inquires on our site about the Trojan Horse Zues Win32/Zbot. This bot was originally discovered in January 2010 but appears to be rearing its ugly head again with a vengeance. Zeus is a banking malware trojan, and specializes in stealing personal information (passwords, account information, etc) from interactions with banking sites through the use of “formgrabs”. This generally means that this trojan is distributed through spam campaigns and drive-by downloads form the web.

Now that a computer(s) has been infected on your network the trojan really gets to work. The bot will then attempt to send out infected emails without being detected. This will more than likely cause your mail server IP to become listed on the CBL Blacklist.

Now you may be asking yourself: How did I get infected when I have Anti-Virus on all machines and am blocking Port 25 traffic on my email server? You have done the majority of the work to protect yourself by locking the front door (Anti-Virus) and the back door (block Port 25), but you may have unknowingly left the window open (Web Filtering). With up to 85% of malware now distributed via the Web, proactive Web security is a necessity.

MxToolbox has partnered with Webroot (May 2010 Newsletter) to offer Web Filtering to protect your network from attacks through the web browser. Our Total Security Solution includes Business Email Perimeter Security in combination with Web Security to provide additional layers of protection to combat Email and Internet threats. Webroot eliminates spyware and viruses with best-of-breed scanning engines and offers a 100% guarantee. In addition to protecting against malware you have the ability to enforce web access policies across your entire organization or specific to groups of employees and generate detailed reports of Internet browsing over time.

Vulnerability Scanning and Spyware Detection

Webroot is the only Web Security Service to include Vulnerability Scanning, which is an extra layer of protection. This tool scans endpoints directly from the Desktop Web Proxy (DWP) to identify known vulnerabilities including operating systems, browser versions, media players, office programs, and other installed software

If you are interested in speaking to one of our web security experts to learn more about our Total Security offering please feel free to contact us at 866-mxtoolbox or at sales@mxtoolbox.com

Additional Resources
Webroot
Wikipedia
Symantec

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September Newsletter – MailFlow Monitoring – Giving you the Power to Save the Day!

mxtoolbox

Most people can relate to that, “I just sent you an email, do you have it YET?” experience.  Most monitors only detect when your email is down completely.  MailFlow Monitoring from MxToolBox will tell you when your server (or service provider) is SLOW.  And, you can see those trends over time.

90 Day View

If you have ever found out that your mail server was down from one of your users, and you are the System Administrator, you know that can be kind of embarrassing, not to mention stressful. MailFlow Monitoring was built specifically by our Engineers to go beyond just monitoring static SMTP availability, so you can know right away when there is an issue. It provides real-time daily, weekly or monthly statistics by monitoring the status of all mail in and out of your server. With this information you can really start to build a true picture of the Up/Down status and performance of your mail server. Plus the system can help you identify any issues with intermittent delays so you can address the problems before they escalate.

How does it work?
The MailFlow Monitor tests the full availability and performance of an SMTP server by sending a test message every five minutes to a predetermined mailbox on your domain. Once the message is injected into your server it obeys the mail hops or set routes and then your mail server auto-replies or forwards the message back to us. Once we receive the reply we automatically graph all the data for you showing the high and low response times and how long it took mail to pass in and out of your server. This graphical data can be sorted by multiple time periods, i.e. last 7 days, 30, days, etc.

7 Day View

We built this service so we could monitor the status of our own many mail servers!  When we really looked at our own needs we didn’t feel that any of the current available monitoring services in the market could tackle this request in an efficient and cool way. After seeing how valuable the end result was in managing our own infrastructure, we realized that we couldn’t keep the tool all to ourselves, so we made it available to everyone!

To get the power to save the day, you need to check out our Basic and Professional Monitoring Products.


*Note that that MailFlow Monitoring is not eligible with a Free Monitor account.

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Copyright 2011 MxToolbox Inc. 12710 Research Blvd. Austin, TX 78759

Is Your Company in the Path of Hurricane Irene? Protect Your Company’s Email with Email Disaster Recovery with MxToolBox

To our friends on the East Coast: If your company is in the path of Hurricane Irene and you don’t have your server prepared, we can help! Our Emergency Email Continuity Product is designed to provide an inbound backup email platform. Our system works by creating a backup mailbox for each of your users that is constantly running. In the event of impending severe weather or Hurricane, you can have peace of mind that your email is safe. Our servers have unlimited mail spooling and will safely store your email until you are ready for it to be released.

Our Emergency Mail system even provides a natural “meeting place” for employees to regroup and collaborate after a widespread disaster when even the office is unavailable. The rich AJAX web client allows users to send and receive mail from their Zimbra mailbox from anywhere at anytime.

Please be safe! If you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to reach out to use at info@mxtoolbox.com or at (866)-MXTOOLBOX / (866)-698-6652.

August Newsletter – All New Crazy Good MxWatch Server Monitoring

Our Engineers have been working double time to release a slew of new features for our Mxwatch Monitoring tool. This tool is designed to take the guessing out of server management we understand that if something is wrong with your email server, you need to know right away! The core features of the tool have always been to send alerts if there is a problem with server performance, availability or if your server has been Blacklisted. Here at MxToolBox we like to think outside the box and this time our Engineers have outdone themselves. Here are all the new features we have released:
MailFlow Monitor
The feature we are the most excited about is our MailFlow Monitoring service. Our Engineers specifically built this one of a kind tool to go beyond just monitoring SMTP, it provides real-time daily, weekly and/or monthly statistics by monitoring the status of all mail in and out of your server. Our system sends a message to your server every 5 minutes, to which your system auto-replies or sends a forward back to us.  This allows you to get a true picture of the Up/Down status and performance of your mail-server!  
 

We built this service so we could monitor the status of our own many mail servers and we didn’t feel that any current solutions on the market could tackle this request in an efficient and awesome way.

TCP Monitoring
If you have your own email server in-house, chances are you may also be running other servers or have other IP Addresses that you may want to keep an eye on; such as your website!  If so, you need to know the status of both at all times so you can react quickly in the event of problems.  We can monitor the status of your website and all other servers (anything operating on the TCP Port Level.)  

Mobile Web App
We know that oftentimes you aren’t sitting in front of your computer when something breaks. That’s why we created a mobile web app that gives you a “Status Board” which quickly identifies if services are up or down with color coding for ease. In the screenshot below the red bar indicates that 127.0.0.2 is currently blacklisted and the clear indication next to http:mxtoolbox.com indicates that the website is up!

Tags & Simple Dashboard
When a service is down or having issues you need to be able to quickly identify the service. Our simple dashboard allows you to quickly see where the problem is by color coding alerts. Red means it is down and green is up…its that simple. To make it even easier you can “tag” your alerts for easy recognition, think of it as a labeling system for your servers, customers etc.

Alert Summaries & Verification
When you monitor many things, your phone beeps MANY times. Who needs the added pressure of their phone vibrating off the table? We eliminate those nerves by checking all related items and then send out a single, concise summary of the entire event.

Snooze Button
When you have already diagnosed the service that is having an issue the last thing you need is continued reminders of the problem. Simply hit the snooze button and our service will quit bugging you temporarily. You can even enable the snooze from your phone!

More Frequent Monitoring
The Professional Monitoring package also does more frequent monitoring of the things you need to take care of.

Summary
In short, we challenge you to find another provider that is offering all of these features in one easy convenient and awesome tool. Here at MxToolBox we are always working to make things easier for you and we feel that our Monitoring tools do just that. Call us directly with any questions to learn more or to get started on a Trial of MxWatch or one of our other Email & Web Security Services!

 

 

 

Blog Email Security Blog

 

Copyright 2011 MxToolbox Inc. 12710 Research Blvd. Austin, TX 78759 

Telnet Test – A Great Troubleshooting Tool & Technique

Oftentimes it is very helpful to remove your mail server from the equation to see if there is an underlying network / reputation problem blocking mail flow. Here’s how you can manually send a test message using the telnet command built into every operating system. You’ll need to determine the name or address of your recipeints mail server. You can do this by looking up their MX record at http://mxtoolbox.com. In my example the MX record is a1.mx-route.com. Your commands are in bold below and the responses I got are in italic. Be careful, on Windows if you typo you cannot backspace and correct yourself. Just hit enter and retype the entire command.

telnet a1.mx-route.com 25
Trying 208.123.79.41…
Connected to a1.mx-route.com (208.123.79.41).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 a1-1.mx-route.com ESMTP

helo mxtoolbox.com
250 a1-1.mx-route.com
mail from: <peter@mxtoolbox.com>
250 sender <peter@mxtoolbox.com> ok
rcpt to: <support@mxtoolbox.com>
250 recipient <support@mxtoolbox.com> ok
data
354 go ahead
Subject: Test Message
This is a test message.
.

250 ok:  Message 156715331 accepted
quit
221 a1-1.mx-route.com
Connection closed by foreign host.

Here you can see that the sender, recipient and message were accepted by the 250 responses from the recieving mail server. If there are problems you will see them reflected with 4xx or 5xx responses that can be very helpful for figuring out the problem.

A few of our readers had asked for an explanation of the above commands, here ya go!

telnet a1.mx-route.com 25 Use the telnet command to connect to a1.mx-route.com on port 25
Trying 208.123.79.41… Trying to connect
Connected to a1.mx-route.com (208.123.79.41). Connection was successful
Escape character is ‘^]’. The server is telling you how to hang up. In this case you press Control-]
220 a1-1.mx-route.com ESMTP This is called the banner. The server is telling you some more about itself and letting you know that it is your turn to talk. In this case the 220 means that it’s a good connection, the machine’s name is a1-1.mx-route.com and it can talk using the ESMTP protocol.

helo mxtoolbox.com We are saying hello to the machine and telling it our domain name. I can use the domain name to reverse lookup our IP and make try to make sure we aren’t spoofing somebody else and that we are reputable.
250 a1-1.mx-route.com The server is saying okay (250 means good) and again telling us it’s name.
mail from: <peter@mxtoolbox.com> I would like to send you a message from <peter@mxtoolbox.com>.
250 sender <peter@mxtoolbox.com> ok The server seems to be agreeable to this idea (again 250 means good). It can use several methods to decide if it wants to accept a message from you.
rcpt to: <support@mxtoolbox.com> I would like to send the message to <support@mxtoolbox.com>.
250 recipient <support@mxtoolbox.com> ok The server again is okay with this transaction so far.
data I am ready to send you the message data.
354 go ahead Server says okie dokie.
Subject: Test Message The message subject.
This is a test message.
Some text.
.
The period all by itself is the signal that we are done sending message data.
250 ok: Message 156715331 accepted The server has successfully (250 again) accepted the message and assigned it ID 156715331.
quit We are done now. You can close the connection.
221 a1-1.mx-route.com The server agrees. . Good bye.
Connection closed by foreign host. The server has closed the connection.

SMTP Diagnostic Tools Updated

I have added some additional information to the SMTP Diagnostic test tool so that we can better troubleshoot Server Down alerts when customers are puzzled because they saw no outage.

I have added the full SMTP transaction transcripts to the SMTP Diag Alert emails. I also configured it to include the actual timeouts for “Timeout occurred due to inactivity” alerts which are what cause the SMTP Diag Failed emails.

Remember that just because we issue a SMTP failed does not mean that they were down or offline, just that they were unable to respond to our connection request within 15 seconds. They should have our testing networks whitelisted on their Firewalls and SMTP Defense mechanisms.

Thanks,


Peter LeBlond
Product Development Engineer
MxToolBox

Update 8/5/2010 11:55 CDT:We have made additional changes to the SMTP Monitoring code to try to alleviate the lingering false Down alerts. Please continue to give us feedback if you continue to experience them.