Email Scout

From Documentation

Revision as of 04:51, 27 November 2006

How we monitor Email

Functional Software ensures that the mail server processes are running on your mail server machine. We currently offer checks for pop3, smtp and imap services.

We also offer a "round-trip" email monitoring service. This tests that your mail server is effectively communicating with the rest of the world.

In all instances, a remote testing email address is required for returning our test email. We suggest that this be a specially set up email, so that the return of constant emails does not conflict with day-to-day usage of a "real" email account

Email Round Trip Monitoring for Unix/Linux

The round-trip email monitor is set up under Linux/Unix using the .forward feature of your mail system. The Functional Monitoring server sends a specifically constructed email to an address that the end-user has created for the purpose of monitoring. We recommend using a name that is easily remembered, such as webscout@company.com or something similar.

The mail server machine that is being monitored does not need to have Functional Software's COSmanager suite installed on it, but a service contract for email monitoring is required. Also, at this time, the email monitoring service does not cover IP Address based email systems.

When editing the .forward file of the chosen email user, you will need to add the line below:

|/<path_to_script>/email_return

This will run the script, but not retain the original message. This ensures that your users mailbox is not filled with unnecessary messages. If you would like to retain the messages, the .forward file becomes:

\username|/<path_to_script>/email_return

This script email_return verifies that the email is originating from Functional Software. If it does come from our monitoring service, it adds a system timestamp to the Subject line of the email, and returns it to the email monitor address. The timestamp is called in UTC format. It is not, however, used in the monitoring metrics, as there is no guarantee that the time on your remote server and the time on our monitoring server will be in synch.

Once the remote email address is set up, we can start monitoring almost immediately.

When the returned email is received by our monitoring email account, another script builds the information required to measure the round-trip email time, and reports that to the sentinel3G Agent.

Email Round Trip Monitoring for Imail

Many thanks to John Treen from Canning College for this workaround for Windows Imail

The following instruction will guide you through the installation and setup of the Imail Email Return Application for use with our Email Round Trip Monitoring Service

1. Place Imail Email Return.exe somewhere on your hard disk
2. Copy vbSendMail.dll to your System32 folder
3. Load a Command Prompt Window (cmd) and run: regsvr32 %SYSTEMROOT\System32\vbSendMail.dll
4. Load the Imail Administrator
5. Expand the folders and navigate to your server name
6. Right click on the Aliases folder and click Add Alias
7. At the New Alias ID screen enter your desired monitoring email address (for the rest of the example we will assume you used webscout)

Email Round Trip Monitoring for Exchange

Information we Require

Once you have entered into an email monitoring service agreement with Functional Software, we will ask you to provide us several pieces of information:

• Your desired CustomerID: this is a string of 8 letters that you will be able to use to log in and view the reporting console
• Your desired display name: this is a string of up to 50 characters
• The email address you would like to use for monitoring
• The email services you would like us to monitor
• Notification and escalation details^*

^* Please note that notification and escalation details are dependent upon the level of contract you undertake.