Your Mail Server is Down, Really…

For about a year we have had a feature in ExchangeDefender called SMTP monitor. Although it was undocumented, many clients found the feature and enabled it. For months the script worked as expected — if we cannot hit the mail server via port 25, send an alert to the “Admin contact email” on file. Sadly, around January the script stopped sending out alerts to partners and the feature became rather useless. Today, we’ve revisited the script and updated it with new check logic and alert control.

Once enabled, the SMTP monitor will check your clients mail server every minute and will check for events like backpressure, broken pipes and server offline. If a critical event is detected the SMTP monitor will send an alert only if a previous alert was not sent in the past hour about the domain.

Emails get sent to the “Domain Admin Email” address under the domain configuration settings. To enable SMTP monitoring login to your XD SP account and select “Change configuration” on the desired domain to enable the checks.

Travis Sheldon
VP, Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com