Member Article

How to keep an eye on your inbox

Though we often take emails for granted, they are essential to the smooth running of every company, enabling both internal and external communications. And as companies’ dependence on email increases so too does its many uses; email not only connects colleagues, buyers and suppliers, it also allows for your performance to be monitored by IT experts, and for reports to be sent out instantaneously allowing for immediate problem solving.

But what if email contact is severed or compromised?

Here are two things your IT team can do to help secure your business communications and make sure the worst doesn’t happen.

CHECK ON DELIVERY

Make sure you use a wide variety of monitoring sensors specifically designed for email servers, like an email round trip sensor, with an appropriate Unified Monitoring solution. These types of sensors allow you to keep tabs on the entire email delivery process from beginning to end, making it possible to monitor both the accessibility and performance of your emails. The program works by measuring the time it takes for a tester email to be sent and retrieved to and from a designated mail server which is constantly monitored.

This round trip function will also often use a colour code to show the efficiency of your server. Green indicates your server is able to send and receive external emails, and retrieve emails using either POP3 or IMAP.

Also, you can place certain time parameters on your emails’ allotted round trip, which will be constantly and automatically monitored. You will immediately be notified if your server fails to meet the chosen time span. This allows you to address the problem before it has a chance to escalate and result in downtime.

CHECK ON EXCHANGE

Keep tabs on your Microsoft Exchange servers and their sensors (for example with a WMI Exchange Server sensor) and be sure to add specific sensors to your programming that can monitor public folders, mail queues, backups as well as mailbox exchanges and overarching databases. That way, you’ll be able to check your server is working efficiently, at all times.

So, for business continuity at all times, take the necessary steps and adopt an effective Unified Monitoring solution to ensure server reliability - and overall peace of mind - and keep the lines of email communication open with colleagues and clients alike.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dirk Paessler .