Alternatives
MXToolbox Alternative — Free Email & DNS Diagnostics
MXToolbox is the long-standing name in email and DNS diagnostics, best known for its MX and blacklist lookups.
Why people look for something else
- You want to run a check without signing in or hitting a per-account limit.
- You need the email-authentication set — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, BIMI — in one place.
- You want the same checks available as a documented API you can script against.
What iPGaze does here
iPGaze covers the same diagnostic ground for email: MX records with preference values, SPF with its parsed mechanisms, DMARC with the policy actually in force, DKIM by selector, plus MTA-STS, TLS-RPT and BIMI. Every check runs without an account, and results are not gated or truncated.
Two things are worth knowing before you switch anything. First, we publish the methodology behind our own measurements — the email-authentication study on this site scanned 10,000 domains and states plainly which metric we chose not to publish because we could not measure it honestly. Second, every lookup above is available on the free JSON API with no key, so a check you run by hand today can be a cron job tomorrow.
What iPGaze does not do is monitoring. There is no alerting, no scheduled re-checks and no historical record of a domain's configuration over time. If you need to be paged when a blacklist entry appears, you want a monitoring product, and that is a different category from an on-demand diagnostic.
The overlapping tools
All free, no account, no result limits:
- MX LookupList a domain's mail exchangers, sorted by priority, with their IPs.
- SPF CheckFind and parse a domain's SPF record and its policy.
- DMARC CheckFind and parse a domain's DMARC policy record.
- DKIM CheckLook up a DKIM public-key record for a domain and selector.
- IP Blacklist CheckCheck an IPv4 address against 14 public DNS blocklists (DNSBLs).
- DNS ReportA health check of a domain's NS, SOA, A/AAAA, MX and SPF configuration.
- MTA-STS CheckCheck a domain's MTA-STS record and policy file.
- BIMI CheckLook up a domain's BIMI brand-logo record.
Scriptable, if you need it
30 of these lookups are available as a free JSON API with no key, no signup and CORS enabled, so a check you run by hand can become a scheduled job. Read the API docs.
Other comparisons
We deliberately make no claims about MXToolbox's pricing, quotas or feature set — those change, and a stale comparison helps nobody. Everything stated above about iPGaze is checkable by running the tools.