Exchange - Internet Tools for Email Diagnostics

As Exchange is internet facing, there are lots of tools that you can use to diagnose problems with your Exchange server. They can help with issues such as:

Why email is not being received
Why email is not being sent
Why email is being rejected
Whether a remote server is live.

Inbound

If you have just setup your Exchange server and have configured the DNS and MX records yourself, then you may be interested to see whether your settings are correct for every other machine on the Internet.

The best place to do this is DNS report: http://www.dnsreport.com/
This site will run a series of tests on your domain, which includes trying to connect the servers listed in your MX records.

There is a web site that allows you to test if an email address exists: http://www.mailtester.com/

Another web site that lets you test your MX records and email server. It also includes a monitoring facility: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/

And another site that tests your settings to see whether they work correctly: http://www.checkdns.net/

This site lets you test your server from a number of different locations: http://www.zmailer.org/mxverify.html

Outbound

If your email is being rejected, then you may want to check whether you are on any blacklists. There are a number of sites to do this, but one of the most comprehensive is "Multi-RBL check": http://rbls.org/
You could also try:

http://openrbl.org/client/
http://dnsbl.toolbot.com/
http://moensted.dk/spam/
http://www.mail-abuse.com/lookup.html ,
http://relaytest.kundenserver.de/view.php (Schlund - parent of One and One),
http://www.spamhaus.org/

You could also use the dnsreport.com web site already linked above to see whether the remote site is alive.

Another site that can test the remote site is http://www.zmailer.org/mxverify.html enter the domain or full email address and it will show you what is happening (or not).

Our guide to diagnostics of SMTP email delivery problems can be found here.

Domain Lookup

For general domain or IP address lookup - to who they are registered to, then try Geek Tools: http://www.geektools.com/whois.php
This site will work out what you have entered (domain or IP) and query the relevant database for that information.

There are links to more DNS tools at the Google Directory:
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Protocols/DNS/Web_Tools/

General Tools

Another site with a range of tools for testing internet services is at http://centralops.net/

Email Traffic

One other site that can be interesting is the SenderBase web site. This tracks email traffic around the world: http://www.senderbase.org/search

DNS Changes Propagation

If you have recently made DNS changes then you can see how far it has propagated to the root servers using the tool at squish.net http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/

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Last Page Update:
01/06/2007

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