MX Toolbox Alternative

I don't have issues with mxtoolbox but I usually use centralops.net as it's fast and I've never had an issue with it's results

OK. Can you use MX Toolbox to try and look at the CNAME or SRV records for sourceoneinsurance.com? See what you get. Maybe I am using it wrong....

I just tried centealops.net on sourceoneinsurance.com and no srv or cname records either. Is GoDaddy doing something to mask them?

Turns out you are right about the cname record I can't get mine to show on those two services or samdns.com.

Im using different providers to you and CloudFlare for DNS. I will do a bit more digging and get back to you

Turns out you can't without the right access: http://serverfault.com/questions/16101/how-to-list-all-cname-records-for-a-given-domain

You'd need to give yourself this access to be able to check cname records, not something I have stumbled on before.

But centralops.net will give you the other records, like dig etc will as well

Interesting. What brought this whole thing up was moving a company to Office 365. Microsoft has you add about 6 or 7 CNAME records, a couple SRV records and a TXT record and then it verifies that those records exists. So there must be a way to verify the existence of a CNAME which, granted, is different then simply finding and displaying all CNAME records. I think in my travels someone said DIG could verify a CNAME.

I guess what I am wondering now is why MX Toolbox has all these neat lookups for things like CNAME and SRV when they don't even work. Maybe to frustrate people like me LOL!

Maybe there is a way to just remove the required permissions for cnames in which case the tool would the be useful.

I have a feeling you can test cname records with HTTP which might be how Microsoft are doing it, I highly doubt its black magic.

You can use dig and I tried that, but you still had to have permissions so mine didn't come back with cname records either.

MXToolbox works just fine.  When you choose a CNAME test all you're doing is a query for the name you enter to find what name it resolves to.  Nothing out there goes and searches for any CNAMES (or other types of records, with the exception of NS and SOA) that may exist in your domain.  Given that a record could be just about anything, the number of possibilities is extraordinarily high (333,446,267,951,815,307,088,493 if you just limit yourself to 15 characters).  The only way to see all that exist is if you have access to the source (whether it's stored as a file, or within Active Directory, etc.).  Access to the source occurs behind DNS, not through it ( suppose one could argue that a zone transfer occurs through DNS, but it's transferring the entire source, not querying individual or types of records).  There's no adjusting of permissions that would change what a query can do.

@footech part of the question is "am I using MX Toolbox incorrectly". Please enlighten me on the proper way to verify a CNAME.