Have you ever jotted down an email address email address and then later not been sure what you wrote? Is that an I or a 1, an O or a 0? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to verify that an address works before composing your message? Well, thanks to a software tools company called Hexellion, this and several other useful utilities are available online, free of charge, at http://centralops.net/co/.
They call it the Email Dossier and when you enter an email address into it, you get back information on the validity of the address, including the mail servers being used and the text of the “coversation” between the tool and the mail server. If the tool reports a valid address, you can be confident that the address exists, even if they can’t guarantee that it belongs to the person you think it does.
Another tool that I use all the time is their Domain Dossier. Enter a web address (domain name or IP) and get back information from the Whois service showing where the domain is registered and which network is hosting it. It also shows the DNS records associated with the domain.
The Ping tool simply sends out a few very small packets of data (the ping) and receives back a response (the pong) to each one. Hopefully, they all get returned in a short “round trip time” (RTT <50 ms). If they don’t, it can indicate server or network problems. Use Ping to answer the question, “is it just me or is the site really down?”
Traceroute shows the number of “hops” that a request makes and which servers it passes through, from the starting point at Hexillion’s server, to the end point at the server you specify. When a server is down, this tool can show you at what point the request gets stuck.
There are several more but these are the ones that I use regularly.
These are technical tools, not often needed by the typical user. However, they provide easy access to information that is often not generally available and having them online means that the information they deliver is independent of your own computer and ISP. There are many of these services available online but Hexillion deserves special mention for having kept these tools available consistently over the last several years. They’re always there when I need them.
Tools photo by Denise Carbonell.
