The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of MX Toolbox
You have an Excel workbook full of domains — client sender domains, server hostnames from a recent acquisition, IP ranges flagged for review. You need to run diagnostic checks against every one of them and write the results back into the workbook in a way that doesn't consume your entire morning.
MX Toolbox is good at running network diagnostics: DNS lookups, blacklist checks, SMTP tests, mail authentication verification. But moving data between it and your workbook is more work than it should be. The usual flow is exporting your domain list to a text file, looking up each domain one at a time in the MX Toolbox web interface, and then re-entering each result value by hand.
Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.
Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste
The default for Excel workflows is often a CSV export of the domain list, which you use as a reference while working through MX Toolbox's web interface. You paste a domain into the search box, read the diagnostic output, switch back to Excel, and enter the result values into the corresponding row.
For five domains that's fine. For 60 acquired company domains that need to be documented before a mail migration — the ones your infrastructure team needs checked before the cutover date — you're not doing analysis anymore, you're doing data entry. Every domain demands a fresh read, and none of the results come in a consistent format.
Method 2: Power Automate
Power Automate has HTTP connectors you can use to hit the MX Toolbox API, plus Excel connectors that read rows and write values back. You can build a flow that triggers for each row in a table, calls the right MX Toolbox endpoint, parses the response, and writes the results to adjacent columns.
Quick check before you invest time here — do you know how to set up an HTTP action in Power Automate? How to parse a JSON response and map nested fields to specific columns? How to handle rate limits or error responses without the flow silently stopping? If those are unfamiliar, this is not the right path. Method 4 is faster.
If you're still reading: building this is real work. You need to authenticate to the MX Toolbox API, pick the correct diagnostic endpoint for each check type, write the expression to extract the right field from the response, and build separate flows for different diagnostic types. It is buildable.
But it fires one row at a time.
Which means aggregating results, comparing this run against a prior snapshot, or generating a summary score across all domains requires a second layer of logic that sits outside the flow entirely.
You probably just need a populated results sheet for your domain list. You probably have no idea how to write an HTTP connector expression in Power Automate — and why would you, that's not what infrastructure audits pay you to do. So you send a request to whoever builds automations on your team, and now you're waiting on that while your migration timeline keeps moving.
Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons
Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook-to-diagnostics workflows was a category of add-ons where you configured a template: input column, check type, output column mapping. You saved the config and ran it when needed.
That was a real improvement over pure manual work. The output was consistent. The column structure was stable. You didn't have to re-enter mappings every run.
But the template configuration was still your responsibility. Every check type needed its own mapping. Every time the workbook structure changed, the config broke until someone updated it. The add-on moved data. The thinking was still on you. Which fields to capture, which rows to include, which diagnostics to run for which scenario — all of that still lived in your head and your config file.
That was the previous generation. It helped, but it asked a lot from the operator.
The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel
There is a different approach. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in MX Toolbox integration it can run diagnostics against every domain in the list and write the results back — for you. No template to configure. No endpoint to pick. No field mapping to manage.
Example 1: Blacklist check across a sender domain list
Run a blacklist check via MXToolbox on every domain in column A and write the total blacklists checked, number of listings found, and the names of any blacklists that flagged the domain into columns B, C, and D
Every domain gets checked. Count of blacklists checked, listing count, and offending blacklist names land in the adjacent columns — one row per domain.
Example 2: SMTP connectivity and TLS confirmation
For each domain in column A, run an SMTP test via MXToolbox and write the connection status, TLS supported yes or no, and any failure reasons into columns B, C, and D
The pattern: describe the source, the destination columns, and what you need to know. SheetXAI handles the MX Toolbox calls and the writebacks without you touching API documentation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a domain or IP list, then ask it to run a diagnostic check across column A. The MX Toolbox integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.
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