Email Scout

From Documentation

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.

How to set up Email Monitoring

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

Using the .forward file, Functional Software will provide a script that runs whenever mail is received to ensure it matches the specific structure we are looking for, so as to avoid accidentally answering spam, or randomly targeted emails. This same script will then add the timestamp (UTC) of when the mail was received by your remote server, and send it back to Functional Software. The timestamp is only collected for informational purposes. It is not used as a monitoring metric, as we cannot guarantee that your email server will be set to the same time as our monitoring server.

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.