New Feature – Notification Delay

We have just introduced a new monitoring feature called “Notification Delay,” which allows you to adjust how long a Monitor must be down before generating a problem alert.

Most of our monitors are high priority–we are notified immediately if there is a problem. However, we have a few that are less important like batch jobs and non-critical systems. Notification is only necessary if they have been down for a longer period of time (maybe 30 minutes or an hour). Another example is automatic maintenance jobs over the weekend that briefly shut down some services and notification is only necessary if something has been down longer than expected.

You can set the delay on the monitor details screen which you can get to from the Monitor Tree, your Dashboard, or your main Monitors list. For your convenience we have put a link directly to the details in all alert emails.
Nofitication-Delay Screenshot 1

The default value is to Send Immediately. You can choose values of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1, 2 or 4 hours of sensitivity.

Nofitication-Delay Screenshot 2

Please note, notification delay is only applicable to MxToolBox “transactional” monitors such as Mailflow, SMTP, TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS. There is not a notification delay setting on Blacklist monitors. To adjust blacklist notification frequencies, contact support to activate the Summary Alert Message (SAM) feature that generates alert reports containing all of your monitors that are in transition in one nicely formatted email message.

Notification Delay is available now to all of our paid users. If you’ve thought about upgrading your free account, now is the time!

New User Interface Design for MxToolbox.com

vt_logo


4/1/2013

MxToolBox constantly works to make our free public DNS, email and diagnostic tools better. We are announcing a major leap forward in user interface technology. We invite everyone to preview the new MxToolBox.

vt_example

vt_term
VT100 technology is now ubiquitous, and represents a major improvement over the outdated VT52 protocol which, let’s be honest, had some limitations. The additional character sets and escape sequences allow the kind of cutting-edge branding and logos marketing teams demand today. User interface developers are now able to deliver the highest possible user experience.

While other websites are stuck with outdated HTML5 technology, MxToolbox is now able to serve users with almost any hardware, including most terminal introduced after August of 1978. VT100 apps are also available for all major smart phone platforms. Well, at least IOS and Android…we’re not sure about Blackberry.

The reduced bandwidth requirements will especially benefit our users in the US, of which an estimated 10 million still have dial-up internet access, with 3 million on AOL alone. With much higher connection speeds, we don’t think the rest of the world will see much performance benefit.

The existing version will continue to be available while the new interface is in beta.

Our future technologies division encourages your feedback and if we can get 1,000 “likes” on Facebook, our management has promised to purchase us a 14.4 Kbps modem!

Controlling Alert Notifications

Notifications MenuNotifications Settings

We recently had someone who uses MxToolbox monitoring contact us with a question of how he could avoid getting blacklist alerts on his phone in the middle of the night while still being able to get mobile alerts for critical things like his MailFlow monitor.

There are a couple of ways to manage your notifications and I wanted to share them here and show how you could use them to take control of the communication we send you.

You can access the Notifications settings under the main settings menu in the upper right.

Main Notification Grid

Notifications Grid

Here you will be presented with all of your monitors and which type of notifications they are configured to send out. You can filter this list to find only monitors that match your criteria and you can use the top checkboxes to turn all of the monitors on or off with a single click. This way you can decide what comes to your inbox and what comes to your phone. If you like, you can configure a monitor to never send notifications at all. More on that later.

Default Notification Options

Default Notification Settings for New Monitors

On your main settings page you can also configure your account to set default options for any new monitors that are created. This is especially helpful if you frequently add monitors and do not wish to get mobile alerts by default.

 

Blacklist Summary Settings

Blacklist Summary Settings

I also mentioned before that you might choose to not receive any notifications for some monitors. If you have many IP Addresses that you are keeping tabs on instead of being notified as each IP goes on and off a list, you can select to receive a helpful summary email which shows the status of all of your blacklist monitors. You can choose these to be generated anywhere from hourly to monthly and choose what time they are mailed to you. These settings are also located on the main settings page.

 

Domain based blacklist monitoring added

Domain Blacklist

Thousand of companies from around the world use MxToolBox’s blacklist lookup and monitoring tools to keep their online reputation safe.  This service checks your IP Address against multiple blacklists to tell you if your server is blacklisted.  Today we are adding domain-based blacklist lookups to the tools.

These domain blacklists (RHBLs, or Right-handed black lists) are an increasingly popular way to attempt to cut down on spam and fraud.  They work like this.  Instead of a server’s IP being listed, an entire domain name could be listed.  For example, if your domain name is example.com, companies may look at the From: field and the body of an email message to see if they contain links to that domain name.

Keep in mind that MxToolBox does not run or endorse any of these lists, and users of our paid monitoring service can opt to “Ignore” these lists from their tool results and monitoring alerts.

All you need to do is run a blacklist check like normal on the website, but instead of entering an IP address, you just enter a domain name (example.com).  MxToolBox will detect that you have entered a domain name and run BOTH the “normal” IP based lists and the domain-based ones as well.

We have added a few new lists this week and expect to add more over the coming weeks.  Anyone can run a domain-based lookup on our web site for free, and users of our paid service can subscribe to alerts on these.

Your next blacklist summary email should reflect these new blacklists for any domain based monitors you have.

Main image courtesy of ivanpw

Office 365 Free Trial From MxToolBox

MxToolbox_Office_365MxToolBox is now offering 90-day free trials for Micosoft Office 365.  If you have thought about moving to the Cloud, now is the perfect time to try something powerful and new in the new year!

If you find server upgrades too costly, yet spend too much time managing your servers, then we have good news for you. Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based productivity service hosted by Microsoft, provides anywhere access to your familiar Office applications, email, calendar, video conferencing, and most up-to-date documents across your devices—all for one predictable monthly fee. With Office 365 you can take advantage of the latest Office client and enterprise-ready tools on virtually any device—from laptops to tablets to smartphones—without having to upgrade your servers. With a financially-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee, best-in-class virus and malware protection, automatic backup and server patches, and geo-redundant data centers,

Office 365 delivers business continuity that’s easy to set up and manage and doesn’t require upfront server costs. With Office 365 you get the best value to fit your changing needs as you grow your business.

New Subnet Management & Calculator Tool

MxToolbox has just launched a new Subnet Calculator tool.  It does basic subnet calculations like many online tools, but with an MxToolbox twist.  It also displays a list of each IP in the subnet and automatically does the reverse DNS lookup for you.  Real data, at your fingertips, free for all of our users.

Subnet Tool
We’ve designed this tool with service providers or larger customers in mind who manage blocks of IP addresses. For our blacklist monitoring customers, we also overlay your blacklist status and reputation data right in top of your subnets. You can also easily save “Name” information directly into the results to make it easier to keep track of things, if your reverse DNS names are not descriptive enough.

All logged in users (free, basic, or pro) will have a history of their subnets available in a drop down menu for easy access.
We are hard at work on more exciting features, and will keep you posted here.

MxToolbox adds Custom Filtering

We have been hard at work behind the scenes at MxToolbox getting ready to launch several new features, the first which is called Custom Filters. The MxToolbox tools are now recording each part of a lookup as separate piece of information. By doing this can now allow our users to ignore any piece of a lookup that might not be important to their organization.

The Custom Filters preference pane

The most common use of the custom filters we predict will be for users to ignore blacklist alerts for lists that they are not interested in being notified for, however the feature is available for all of our monitoring lookup types and can be tailored to fit specific monitoring needs.

Custom Filters are only available for customers with at least a Basic account which starts at $20 per month. Basic packages also come with additional monitors, more frequent monitoring, our bulk add tool, and a tag based dashboard. Visit our upgrade page to see the full details to our Basic and Professional packages.

Disable Outlook Filtering

Many administrators don’t realize that Outlook by default has its own filtering in place. This filtering is very basic and it doesn’t usually cause any issues with your existing mail server security or 3rd party filtering. If you have exhausted your efforts in troubleshooting missing mail or false positives you may disable this filtering to see if that helps. To disable Outlook Filtering, follow these steps:

  1. Open Outlook
  2. Click Actions > Junk E-mail >Junk E-mail Options
  3. Select No automatic filtering;
  4. Press OK.

Search Gmail logs in the administrator control panel

This is very exciting news!

What happened to an inbound or outbound message? Was a message sent to my domain and marked as spam? Which users sent or received a specific message? Starting today, domain admins can get answers to these and other such questions using Gmail log search. This feature is now available in the administrator control panel.

See Finding messages with email log search for steps on using the email log tool located within the Reports tab. See Viewing message details for a description of the output. Finally, see Interpreting message details for recommendations on using log search results to investigate delivery issues.

Guidelines

When using email log search, keep in mind these limitations and conditions:

  • Only super administrators have access to email log search.
  • Resellers do not have access to the email log search feature for a resold domain when accessing its control panel via the reseller console.
  • Messages may take up to an hour after being sent or received to appear in the email log search database.
  • Only messages from the past 30 days can be retrieved via search.
  • The maximum date range for queries is a seven-day period.
  • Log times are shown in the administrator’s own time zone.
  • Mail sent to a Google Group or other mailing list doesn’t appear unless a Google Apps user is a member of that group and a recipient of the message.
  • Focused queries are faster and recommended. For instance, a specific message ID query may take a few seconds to return results while more generic queries without a message ID may take dozens of seconds to complete.
  • Search values must be complete. No partial matches or wild cards are supported.
  • Although the subject is shown in search results, messages cannot be queried by subject.
  • Only one sender or recipient can be entered in a query. Multiple entries are not supported.

For more information:
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2604578

May Newsletter – A Customer Service Company that Happens to Provide Email & Web Security!

 

mxtoolbox

 

Most people come to mxtoolbox.com to use our Free Tools or MxWatch Server Monitoring. In addition to our Free Tools and MxWatch, we also offer Business Email & Web Security Services. Both our MxWatch and Email services come with complimentary support. Our team of Support Technicians and Account Managers are dedicated to meeting your needs and addressing any concerns or questions you may have. The end goal is to build an ongoing business relationship where all of your Email, Monitoring or Web Security needs are fulfilled. Unlike some companies, we aren’t here to sell you something once and never work with you again. We strive to constantly and consistently exceed our customer’s expectations. You may ask, how do we do that?

Listening
We know that when you are having a problem with your server or email it can be very stressful. As a Consultant, System Administrator or the guy in charge of the server, you need immediate resolution as we understand that email is the lifeblood of any business. We also know how frustrating it is to call a provider and not be able to reach someone. That doesn’t happen at MxToolBox; you have a direct line to our team. Our Support Technicians work hard to listen to your issue and then provide solutions. We don’t do lip service here, we will either offer a solution or work with you until we find one.

Training
Our Technicians are continually training and participating in continuing education so they can stay ahead of the game. Technology is changing rapidly around us and it is our obligation to understand those changes.  As your provider, it is both our responsibility and our pleasure to pass on that knowledge. We also host Forums and a Technical Blog as another way to pass on the good word.

Resolution
Every business has their share of complaints and we work with our team to ensure that problems are dealt with immediately for quick resolution. We work hard to take responsibility for our mistakes and you won’t get caught in a transfer loop or passed around from one place to another. Typically your issue can be resolved with any team member that picks up the phone.

The Extra Step
Just like at your local hardware store we won’t point you to “Aisle 3” and go on with our day. Instead we take pride in leading you to the solution if possible. We’ve built online knowledge bases for all of our tools and products, we are available by phone (866-MXTOOLBOX), email, Support Ticket, Twitter, Facebook or distress signals. You can either reach out to us directly by one of the methods above or delve into our helpful documentation to find the answer yourself.

Referrals
Referrals are a great sign that you are happy with our services and support. We want you to know how much we appreciate your stellar feedback and we will reward you for spreading the good word. Active customers that pass on referrals can receive a 15% discount on their next quarterly invoice. If you’re not already on one of our Business Email or Web Security Services, reference this newsletter when you contact us and we’ll offer you 10% off any new service purchase!

We are here to help you solve problems, not be another problem you have to deal with. Our team prides itself in being highly available and knowledgeable. Pick up the phone today, put us to the test, we’re standing at the ready. Stay tuned for future newsletters that will spotlight the individual members of our team (Chad, Brendan, John, Peter, Douglas, Wendy, Brian or Jeremy).

 

Copyright 2012 MxToolbox Inc. 12710 Research Blvd. Austin, TX 78759