Tag Archives: New Tools

Microsoft’s 2022 Bug

This week Microsoft announced a bug with Exchange servers that can cause email queueing delays and potentially loss of email. Read more on the specifics here. While it took Microsoft only a few days to issue a workaround and a patch, the issue is the potential downtime and loss of communications that affects your business.

How does this affect you?

If you are running on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers, until you are patched, your servers will queue email. If you send more email than you have disk space on your servers, that email will be lost. Similarly, if you are using a 3rd-party inbox provider that runs on MS Exchange, email service will be disrupted until patched. Depending on disk space on these servers messages could be lost.

Does your business run on email?

If you are like most businesses, you run on email. You probably even take for granted that your email will be delivered within a reasonable amount of time. Issues like this show that email is not infallible and emphasize the need for an expert in email to maintain top email delivery.

How does MxToolbox help?

MxToolbox is the expert in Email Delivery and Email Deliverability. Our team created a complete suite of tools and monitors email delays or failures like this Exchange issue. Here are a few tools that make your life better:

SuperTool (free)

Use the SuperTool to examine individual email configuration issues:

  • MX records – makes sure senders can find your email servers
  • Blacklist status – check the IP addresses in your MX records for Blacklisting which will impact your ability to send email
  • SMTP Check – Check communications with your email server
  • DMARC Lookup – Check the validity of your DMARC setup
  • Header Analyzer – Analyze incoming email for threats or out-bound emails for DMARC, SPF and DKIM compatibility.
  • Email Health – Run a comprehensive series of checks on the email configuration of your domain. You can run Email Health here.

Each of these tools will allow you to keep an eye on your email configuration when run regularly. You can create a monitor for one of these for free, or, you can upgrade to a monitoring solution that automatically checks your configuration.

Round-trip email monitoring

A part of our Delivery Center suite of tools, Mailflow Monitoring performs a regular, periodic check of end-to-end email flow through your servers. Run every five minutes, Mailflow Monitoring, gives you quick insight into slowdowns in your email systems. In fact, dozens of MxToolbox Mailflow Monitoring customers realized the MS Exchange issue before Microsoft announced it. Our Mailflow Monitoring detected a slow down in their servers and alerted them to the issue, enabling them to clean queues and expand disk space before suffering an email outage. Learn more about Mailflow here.

Regardless of why your business is running an in-house email server, MxToolbox has a suite of tools and products to help you keep your email running smoothly and alert you to potential issues. Check out MxToolbox Delivery Center for all your email deliverability needs.

New!

Everything is New!  Okay, not everything but quite a few things…  You might have noticed that in the last 6 months we have added a number of new lookups, monitors and premium monitors.  Here’s a brief list to refresh your memory:

new_prosummary

New features in the Professional interface.

With all the new features, we decided we needed to share the good news.  So, we’ve added a way that everyone can see our new features as we add them.  Clicking on “New!” either on the “More” Tools page or in the Professional interface will give you access to a list of tools we added in the last 90 days.

New features on the More Tools page.

New features on the More Tools page.

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!