How to: Email Server Monitoring with Uptrends

It seems like email has been around forever, and we all take it for granted. For many of us, it has been forever, for email has been around since the 1960s in various forms. By 1995 SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email protocols became the standard. To make sure your staff and customers can continue to take email for granted, you should use Email Server Monitoring from Uptrends. Uptrends now supports IMAP server monitoring.

Is email still relevant?

It is easy to dismiss email as passé or antiquated with most interpersonal communications happening on social media and messaging apps, but reports show that businesses send and receive 124.5 billion emails a day, while consumers send and receive 111.1 billion emails a day. That is a lot of emails, and experts say that those numbers will continue to rise to 320 billion daily emails a day by 2021.

Business relies on email

You will find some businesses that no longer publish email addresses, and instead these businesses rely on ticketing systems, chat, and Twitter to communicate with customers. Ultimately many of those alternative systems end up utilizing email at some point along the process to send chat transcripts, conduct customer service surveys, and send confirmation emails. Either way, at some point email becomes an essential part of the process.

What happens when email servers fail to send or receive emails? Well, nothing. Everything stops. Internal communications suffer, and customers can’t get the confirmation emails and password update emails. Your marketing, appointment reminders, support ticket systems, and two-step authentication systems all stop working.

Failing email servers bring down productivity, frustrate customers, and impact revenue. Depending on where the problem occurs, you may not know about a problem for hours or even days in some cases. Have a plan in place in the event of an email outage that includes Uptrends’ email server monitoring.

Email Server Monitor types

Sure, you can just Monitor the server with a simple ping server, but all that tells you is that the monitor found the server on the network. A ping server monitor isn’t going to tell you whether it can connect to the server using a specific protocol. With Uptrends Email Server Monitoring, you can test your SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email servers to make sure the protocol works and make sure connections are possible.

SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the standard for email transmission. Most email providers use SMTP for sending email messages only, and although you can use it to receive as well, most email providers do not use it for client retrieval of email.

POP3

The third version of the Post Office Protocol allows email clients to retrieve emails from the server and store them on the client. Typically, when using POP3, the client downloads and immediately deletes email from the server. Optionally the user may choose to leave a copy on the server. The server copy stays until the user instructs their email application to delete the server copy.

IMAP

The Internet Message Access Protocol gives a user access to an email account across applications and devices. Although you can use two or more POP3 applications for a single account across devices, doing so might mean multiple copies of an email on devices that the user needs to managed separately. IMAP keeps email synchronized across devices.

SMTP, POP3, IMAP Email Server Monitoring

You should set up an email server monitor for each protocol that you support even if they share the same machine. It isn’t unheard of for one protocol to complete successfully while the other fails.

Each monitor uses the specified IP address and port to conduct the tests. If you provide login credentials, your email monitor will also attempt a login. You can also check your secure connections for your IMAP server.

Uptrends’ Email Server Monitoring checks your email servers externally to your system from the customer’s and remote employee perspective using Uptrends’ global network of 200 checkpoint locations. If at any point our monitor can’t locate, connect, receives an error code, exceeds performance limits, or can’t authenticate a user, Uptrends records an error. On the first error, Uptrends immediately retests your server from a different checkpoint. If the monitor receives another error, Uptrends considers the error confirmed and issues an alert right away. You will always know the status of your email servers.

Setting up Email Server Monitoring is easy

All you need to set up your monitors are the domain or IPv4/IPv6 IP address, the type of server your testing, and the port number if you’re not using the default. Choose checkpoint locations from some or all of our 200 global Checkpoint locations, or if you’ve got a Private Checkpoint, test from behind your firewall. It only takes a few minutes to protect your email servers and make sure your communications go uninterrupted.