subject: Learn The Steps To Monitor Smtp Server [print this page] The cut end technology has made life easier as all the comforts are available at our fingertips. The internet era has brought a revolution today. Just a click on the mouse and everything is right in front of you. Sending mails is an activity which one has to perform daily. While sending a mail, there are lots of activities which take place but are unknown to a lay man.
When the send icon is clicked, the message comes in control of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SMTP then transfers the message to the recipients server. Once this server malfunctions, the message will not be delivered.
Reasons behind undelivered message:
If the message is not delivered, there may be plenty of reasons behind it. Some of them are:
Failure to connect to the internet.
Crashing of operating system due to shortage of resources like disk space etc.
Configuration error by the mail administrator.
Mails may be prevented from delivery if the server is blacklisted to stop spam.
Therefore, monitoring the SMTP mail server is very important. Big business firms where sending and receiving of mails are done on a large basis needs instant monitoring to avoid any kind of trouble. Some of the website monitoring services also supports monitoring of SMTP. It works as:
The monitoring service tries to establish a socket connection with the SMTP server. This process is done using the transmission control protocol. A SYN packet is send to the SMTP server and then a response is received from ACK packet. If this fails, it is clear that SMTP service is not responding.
If the process is set up successfully, protocol commands will be used to communicate. The ways which can work here are-
Once if the connection is established, SMTP mail server will respond with the banner. If there is no banner, something might have gone wrong.
Next step starts with an introduction. The monitoring service introduces by sending a HELO command. This command will appear as HELO my.domain.net.
If everything is error-free, the SMTP server will start working and respond with 25 Hello my.domain.net, pleased to meet you. This makes it clear that SMTP mail server is connected and ready to receive more commands.
The failure, time and content will help in checking the problem if there is any failure noticed by the monitoring service. Alerts by emails or SMS text will be delivered to you.
Thus with monitoring services, you will be able to check the functioning of the mail server. There are few website monitoring services which undergo different process to test the mail sending process.
