Mail Flow Monitor

A Monitoring solution for your e-mail and web server

Communication is one of the key elements to a successful business, as email is the most popular form of communication it is important to know when your company emails stop!

How do you know when your email system fails?

Tired Of:

• Not knowing when problems occur
• e-mail system going off-line
• Periods of downtime
• Important e-mails not reaching your clients
• Waiting for e-mails to arrive not knowing there’s a problem with your server

Want To:

• Reduce down time
• Know when problems occur straight away
• Have peace of mind knowing that your email system is working
• Receive an alert when problems occur and when problems are resolved
• Receive reports of your e-mail systems day performance

Knowing the problem is the first step to resolving it!

Solution
Mail Flow Monitor is an On-Line email monitoring system that lets you know when email stops flowing in or out of your company. Notifications of service problems can be sent to your mobile via SMS or to an external email address such as your support company. Use the Mail Flow Monitor Client to keep an eye on your server and your mail flow.

How It Works
Most e-mail monitoring solutions only monitor the service status of your server such as POP3 or SMTP, just because the server responds it doesn’t mean that emails are flowing! Problems are only noticed when users mention that they haven’t received any emails for a while.

Mail Flow Monitor checks the service status and also tests that mail is being sent and received. You’ll know if communication stops!

Mail Flow Test

To check that your company is receiving e-mails, Mail Flow Monitors monitoring server sends an e-mail to your server and then checks that the e-mail has been received.  To check that your company is sending e-mails the monitoring server will send an e-mail from your server to Mail Flow Monitor, it then checks to see if the e-mail has been received.  Depending on how you receive e-mail and your Internet connection speed, different time thresholds can be set to increase or decrease the sensitivity of the test. 

Other Tests
ICMP Test – Checks your Internet connection
POP3 Test – Checks your POP3 server
SMTP Test – Checks your SMTP server
Web Test – Checks your web site

Knowing when a problem occurs
When a problem occurs Mail Flow Monitor has three methods to indicate the problem:

• Email to external address – configure the monitoring server to send an e-mail to your support company or to another email account regularly used.  The e-mail alert will specify your company name and the service having the problem
• Text Message – Register at www.mailflowmonitor.co.uk for a text account and you can have alerts delivered to your mobile.  The text alert will include your company name and the service having the problem
• Mail Flow Monitor Client – this provides a visual aid and can be installed on any number of PC’s.  There are two types of clients, single user and multi-user client

Single User Client
Designed for companies who have only one domain name and only one server, the client sits at the top of your desktop and indicates problems using a traffic warning system.  Red to indicate system errors and green to indicate that the systems working.

Multi-User Client
Companies that have multiple email servers can view the status of all their servers from one application.  The multi-user client consists of two parts, the first is a status bar indicating the overall status of all the servers being monitored.  The second part is a breakdown of each server being monitored.

Reports
During the day the monitoring server logs the performance of your e-mail server, at the end of the day these logs are used to compile reports which are e-mailed to the address specified.  Using the web interface you can select which reports you wish to receive.

Web Interface
Mail Flow Monitor is configurable using a web interface, when logged on details of your connection and mail server can be configured.  As well as enabling or disabling the monitoring system, email alerts and reporting.

System Requirements

• A fixed external IP address
• An e-mail server, web server or both
• Microsoft Excel or Excel Viewer (to view reports)

 For more informaiton on Mail Flow or to arrange for a quote, please contact us for a free appraisal.