Email hosting provider of Leads/Contacts bulk MX record look up

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys

I'm wanting to find out what the breakdown of our Leads/Contacts mail hosting options. E.g. how many on Google, how many on hosted Exchange, how many "private" systems. 

Anybody got a "tool" that does an MX lookup on the lead/contact domain and populate a field so we could create a report on that? 

Thanks guys

(Response from Support)

Hi Andy, 

Thank you for contacting Marketo Support. At this time we do not have any functionality within Marketo to query and populate the information you are inquiring about. Something I can suggest is posting this request in our Ideas forum. Our Product Managers review the requests posted in the Ideas forum for roadmapping features for Marketo. I hope this information is helpful. 

Thanks, 

Robert

Please view your case on the Marketo Support Portal to add comments.

Best regards,

Robert Solis

Marketo Customer Support

[SanfordWhiteman]

I've done exactly this report, but didn't bring the results back into Marketo -- bear in mind that even if you bulk-update 300 leads at a time you can use up a lot of your 10,000 API calls per day.

All I did is a dump to Excel, then ran the results through Windows' built-in nslookup.  Remember, MX records can include servers at more than one domain, so you are going to get overlaps (i.e. "example.com uses MessageLabs" and "example.com uses a private mailserver" can both be true).  Also, just because example.com's mailserver is host.example.com that doesn't mean that hostname isn't a "vanity hostname" actually pointing to machine0921.bigantispamprovider.com.

Good luck!

 

[Josh_Hill13]

Out of curiosity, what would this MX or domain report help you with?

[SanfordWhiteman]

For us, MessageLabs -- which we ourselves use -- was swallowing (i.e. silently deleting) our messages at a certain point, though everything content-, DNS-, and blacklist-wise looked good to us.  We were asked to run the report to get an approximate % of our lead database that did not receive emails during this timeframe.

Another time I used it was when looking into the X-List-Unsubscribe header and wanting to get a look at the number of people who used the GMail web interface -- i.e. either GMail personal users or Google business users.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford...not a Windows shop, and did see the Power Shell stuff, but won't be touching a Windows O/S again...unfortunately 😉

Josh, there a couple of reasons. One is from a current customer perspective, having this information allows us to understand what tools may be of use to our customer base when sending them emails. An example may be us sending a custom calendar invite, with an ICS file attached, but the the customer never sees the custom comms, because Gmail "smartly" interperts the ICS file. Also what should we prioritize and include Marketo emails/landing pages for "Add to my calendar". Marketo is way behind in having buttons for events, and you have to muck around with My Tokens.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Andy you can use dig, it's the industry standard and exactly the same idea (that's what I actually use but I didn't want to require you to download anything).