Email Monitoring

As the importance of electronic mail has grown, so has the need to ensure that your email servers are working properly. Without fully functioning email servers, your ability to communicate internally with co-workers, as well as externally with customers and clients is impossible.  Monitoring and maintaining the health of your email servers has become vital in your business' communication and even in its very existence.

PRTG Network Monitor is the all-in-one network monitoring solution, which covers the complete range of monitoring needs from availability monitoring to bandwidth and usage monitoring, as well as email monitoring. PRTG can easily be installed on Windows XP, 2003, 2008 and can be quickly configured using its intuitive Ajax-based web interface. PRTG comes with preconfigured device templates (e.g. MS Exchange) so that Email monitoring with auto discovery is set up and functioning within minutes.

PRTG's standard SMTP, POP3 and IMAP sensors check the availability of these services and inform you if an outage occurs. See the full list of supported features and sensor types.

Freeware and free 30-day-trial available!

Proper email monitoring also requires being able to ensure the end-to-end delivery of emails. For that purpose PRTG Network Monitor includes two dedicated email round trip sensors that make it possible to monitor availability and performance of the complete email delivery process:

• SMTP & IMAP Round Trip Sensor
• SMTP & POP3 Round Trip Sensor

How does it work?

Both sensor types initially deliver an email to a mail server using SMTP. Then a mailbox is scanned using POP3 or IMAP until the email arrives. The graph on the right shows a sample configuration:

• Step 1: PRTG delivers an email via the SMTP protocol to a mail server (just like an email client).
• Step 2: The SMTP server delivers the email to a POP3 server (which can be located at a remote site, in your local LAN or on the same server).
• Step 3: Every few seconds PRTG retrieves emails from the POP3 server until the test email arrives.

Read more about how to set up and configure round trip email monitoring in Dirk's blog.

Setting up email monitoring does not have to be expensive: PRTG Network Monitor's Freeware Edition includes all sensor types (including an SNMP Trap monitor). This Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use, and may be downloaded at no cost.

The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than ten sensors. Licenses for our email monitoring software PRTG start at $380 / €250. You can set up and test email monitoring with the fully functional 30-Day-Trial-Edition.