DNS Lookup — Every Record Type, Instantly

Reading records and TTLs when mail breaks

A DNS lookup tool queries a domain's records — A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME or SOA — and shows each live answer with its TTL, which is how you debug mail delivery and pointing problems. Worked example: a customer says mail to billing@myshop.example bounces. Pick MX and the answer comes back like '10 mail.myshop.example, TTL 3600' — priority 10 means try that host first, and a TTL of 3600 is one hour, so caches refresh within the hour. Then run TXT: if the v=spf1 string is missing or names the wrong mail host, receiving servers have a reason to reject you. Two lookups, and the fault is usually cornered.

One habit separates pros: check the TTL before you change anything. A record sitting at 86,400 seconds — that's 24 hours — keeps serving the old answer to caches for a full day after your edit, so the classic move is dropping the TTL to 300 seconds a day ahead of a planned switch, making the change, then restoring a long TTL once things settle. And remember this tool answers fresh from Cloudflare's DoH resolver; a colleague's ISP cache can still be telling yesterday's story.