If Your Email Server Stops Accepting Emails How Long Will it Take You to Find Out?
Quick Answer
Use an external mail flow monitoring service that tests SMTP transactions and round-trip time end-to-end (not just port response) every few minutes and alerts you when something breaks. Detection time without monitoring is typically hours, sometimes longer if it happens overnight or on a weekend. MailFlowMonitoring.com offers this for free across an unlimited number of mail servers, supports email, webhook, SMS, PagerDuty, and Slack alerts, lets you set independent notification policies per server, and shows real-time and historical stats in a dashboard. Key thresholds to configure: check interval (how often to test), round-trip time ceiling (when slow becomes a failure), and notification delay rate so you do not page on transient single-check blips. Setup takes about five minutes, and the free tier removes the cost objection that keeps small operators from monitoring at all.
Servers go down. And when they do it can negatively impact your business, from lost productivity to lost customers. You don’t want that to happen. Monitoring email is not as simple as checking to see if the port responds, you have to validate that the entire mail flow is functioning. So, how do you find out that your email server is down and not accepting emails or just taking too long to respond? More importantly, how long does it take for you to discover it? Minutes? Hours?
What you need is a mail flow monitoring service. One that checks your email server status every few minutes automatically without any intervention from you and alerts you if something isn’t right. Oh sure, there are monitoring tools out there, but they’re expensive, costing up to $30 per month per monitor.
What you need is a mail flow monitoring service that doesn’t cost anything. Oh sure, there are some free monitoring services out there, but they typically limit you to monitoring only one mail server.
What you need is a mail flow monitoring service that doesn’t cost anything and lets you monitor an unlimited number of email servers and also lets you:
- Choose how to be alerted (email, webhook, SMS, PagerDuty or Slack)
- Set up an unlimited number of notification policies
- Set up different alert methods for different policies
- Control how often to check your mail servers
- Control the Round Trip Time (RTT) threshold
- Control the Notification Delay Rate
- See real-time and historical stats in an easy-to-use dashboard
- Get up and running in 5 minutes
Something like that does exist and it’s MailFlowMonitoring.com. It monitors the smtp transactions and email round trip time for free, the way you want to monitor them.
General Manager
General Manager at DuoCircle. Product strategy and commercial lead across the email security portfolio.
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