SMTP Monitoring with NodePing

2023/08/22 by Leave a comment

In the world of email communication, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) plays a crucial role in ensuring the seamless delivery of messages. However, like any other technology, SMTP is not immune to issues that can disrupt email flow and affect business operations. To maintain a healthy and reliable email infrastructure, it is essential to monitor SMTP servers continuously. In this blog post, we will explore how NodePing can be used to monitor for SMTP functionality, packet loss, blacklisting, deferred queues, and MX/SPF records.

NodePing is a versatile and powerful server monitoring service that allows businesses to monitor their infrastructure’s performance and uptime. With its extensive range of monitoring checks, NodePing provides an excellent solution for monitoring SMTP servers and ensuring they are operating optimally.

Monitoring SMTP Functionality

Verifying the functionality of your incoming SMTP server is crucial to ensure that it can receive emails without any hiccups. NodePing’s SMTP check allows you to periodically test your SMTP server by trying to send a test email to a designated email address. If the test email is accepted, it indicates that your SMTP server is functioning correctly. In case of failures, like timeouts or server errors, NodePing will promptly alert you, enabling you to troubleshoot and rectify the issues.

Monitoring Packet Loss

Packet loss can severely impact the performance of your SMTP server and lead to email delivery delays or failures. NodePing’s ICMP PING check is a valuable tool to monitor packet loss and routing issues to to your SMTP server. By regularly performing ping tests, you can assess packet loss trends and determine whether network-related issues are affecting your email delivery. If a failure is seen, NodePing automated diagnostics will send you MTR results so you can quickly troubleshoot where the issue originates. Addressing packet loss problems promptly will lead to a smoother email experience for your users.

Monitoring SMTP Blacklisting

Blacklisting can be detrimental to email delivery, as it prevents messages from reaching their intended recipients. NodePing’s RBL check allows you to monitor your SMTP server’s IP addresses against popular DNS-based blacklists (RBLs) such as Spamhaus and Barracuda. By configuring blacklisting checks at regular intervals, you can quickly identify if your server’s IP addresses have been blacklisted, enabling you to take immediate action to resolve the issue and maintain a good sender reputation.

Monitoring Deferred Queues

When your SMTP server is unable to deliver emails to the recipient’s mailbox immediately, it sits in the deferred queue. If emails in your deferred queues are piling up, you likely have a delivery issue. NodePing’s PUSH check can watch your deferred queues and send you notifications if they rise above what you’re comfortable with; allowing you to investigate and resolve the underlying problems before they escalate.

Monitoring MX Records

MX (Mail Exchange) DNS records play a crucial role in email delivery by specifying the mail servers responsible for receiving emails for a domain. NodePing’s DNS check allows you to monitor the MX records of your domain to ensure they are correctly configured and that your DNS servers are responding with those records properly. Regular checks of MX records help you keep incoming mail flowing.

Monitoring SPF Record

Your SPF record is actually a TXT DNS record that specifies which servers are allowed to send email from your domain. If that record is missing, compromised, or your DNS servers aren’t responding, sending email may be blocked or delayed. NodePing’s DNS check will make sure your SPF record is available and hasn’t been hacked. That will keep your outgoing mail flowing.

In conclusion, email monitoring is essential to ensure the reliability and efficiency of your message communications. NodePing provides a comprehensive suite of checks that empower you to monitor for blacklisting, SMTP functionality, packet loss, deferred queues, along with MX and SPF records. By leveraging NodePing’s monitoring capabilities, you can proactively identify and address issues affecting your SMTP server’s availability and performance, leading to better email deliverability and improved customer satisfaction.

Remember, a robust email infrastructure is the backbone of modern businesses, and investing in reliable monitoring tools like NodePing with automated diagnostics is a step towards a smoother and more efficient communication system.

Start monitoring your SMTP servers with NodePing today by signing up for our free, 15-day trial and stay one step ahead of any potential email delivery challenges!

Filed under DNS, Email, Monitoring, PING, SMTP, uptime Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Custom Email Branding in NodePing

2023/07/25 by Leave a comment

NodePing is pretty popular with hosting service providers and marketing companies that want to keep an eye on their customer’s websites and other Internet-facing services. One of the features they often use is to send NodePing email alerts from one of their own branded email addresses. Uptime alerts with your own ‘from’ email, like ‘support@examplecompany.com’, is a great way to keep brand recognition and increase cohesion with your customers and allows those customers to respond to alerts directly to your support system, not NodePing.

Setting a custom ‘from’ email address for NodePing email notifications is easy. You only need to:

  • Change the ‘from’ email in your branding settings
  • Update your SPF record to include NodePing’s SMTP servers

Email Templates

To change the ‘from’ email address for notifications, login to your NodePing account and navigate to Account Settings -> Branding. In the Notifications section, you’ll see there are 4 different email templates:

  • First
  • Up
  • Down
  • Diagnostic

You’ll need to modify the ‘From’ email address in each of those and click on the corresponding “Save…” button for each of the 4 email templates. It may take up to 10 minutes for those settings to take effect.

SPF Record

Your SPF record is a DNS record that tells email services where email from your domain is allowed to be sent from. If you try to send email from a server that isn’t in your SPF, there’s a good chance that email is going to get rejected or marked as spam. It’s basically a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to send email with your domain in the ‘from’ field.

If you don’t modify your SPF record, there’s an increased chance notification emails will bounce or be marked as spam. Let’s add the NodePing SMTP servers to your domain’s SPF record to increase deliverability. Modifying that special TXT DNS record usually happens at your domain registrar or DNS provider. You’ll need to login there and edit the existing SPF record. If one doesn’t exist, you’ll want to create one.

If you have an existing SPF record, you can add the following to it:

include:spf.nodeping.com

Sometimes an example is the best way to see how this modification is done. Below is an SPF record before adding the NodePing entry.

"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net ~all"

And now that same SPF record with the NodePing entry added to it.

"v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net include:spf.nodeping.com ~all"

It doesn’t matter which order you put the NodePing entry in, so long as it’s after the ‘v=spf1’ part and before the ‘all’ part. Those need to bookend a valid SPF record.

Once that record is saved and propagated through DNS, your contacts should be able to receive NodePing alerts with your very own ‘from’ email address on them.

Customizing your NodePing email notifications is a great way to increase brand recognition and cohesion with your customers. With NodePing, you’ll be the first to know when services are offline. Quick detection means quick resolution and more uptime.

If you don’t yet have a NodePing account, please consider signing up for our free, 15-day trial. See for yourself why those who know, use fast, reliable, and affordable NodePing.

Filed under Email, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,

Email monitoring done right

2013/02/25 by Leave a comment

For several years before starting NodePing I worked in a number of different roles in IT, including system administration, project management, infrastructure and network management, and development. A sizable chunk of that time was spent at an organization that ran email servers in a number of different countries scattered around the world. Making sure that all of those email systems were working properly and generating useful reporting was a huge challenge, and involved a lot of repetitive manual steps.

Availability report outputNodePing’s monitoring services were largely motivated by the desire to make widespread monitoring of web sites and other Internet accessible services as simple and automatic as possible. One of the reasons I’m so excited about our suite of email monitoring checks is that I know from personal experience how important these tools are, both from a sys admin’s point of view as well as from technical management roles.

The core of this set of tools is SMTP monitoring. This check has several options that allow you to check the remote SMTP server in a variety of ways. At its most basic, it can be used to check that the server is operating and answering to SMTP connections and is accessible. It can also watch the SSL/TLS certificates, and notify you in advance of when certificates will expire. The check also can be used to monitor if the SMTP server accepts or denies specific email addresses, which can be used for open relay monitoring. Authentication verification can make sure that the server is logging people in properly. This is particularly important when email servers are integrated with separate directory services, such as an LDAP service or Active Directory.

SMTP server monitoring should also be paired with RBL monitoring. This checks the server’s address against a number of different RBL services, and can notify you if the server has been blacklisted. Any experienced email administrator knows that staying off of these lists is critically important, and it is possible to get on a black list without doing anything outside of normal business practices. When it happens you need to know quickly so you can remedy or clarify the situation and get off of the black list before it negatively impacts business.

The IMAP and POP checks go hand in hand with the SMTP check to ensure that your customers and employees can retrieve mail from their inboxes. Like the SMTP check, these checks not only monitor that the server is accepting connections, but can verify authentication and warn you in advance if an SSL certificate is nearing expiration.

The final piece of the email service monitoring tool set is monitoring the web interface. Here NodePing’s HTTP Content check can be used to make sure that the service is responding with the proper web page, and the SSL check can verify that the web interface’s SSL certificate is in place and working properly, as well as warn of a nearing expiration date.

These checks together provide a full complement of tools for monitoring email services. For most systems, we’d suggest a full set of checks:

  • The SMTP service is operating properly on port 25, accept a STARTTLS command, accepts authentication, and accepts a given address for relay from an authenticated user. All of this, with verification of the TLS certificate, can be done with one check.
  • The SMTP service is listening and accepting SSL based connections on port 587.
  • The SMTP service rejects open relay requests.
  • The SMTP service accepts a local address from non-authenticated hosts.
  • The server is not on any RBL’s.
  • The IMAP server is operating properly on port 143 and authenticating properly
  • The IMAP server is operating properly on port 993 and the SSL certificate is good
  • The POP server is operating properly on port 110 and authenticating properly
  • The POP server is operating properly on port 995 and the SSL certificate is good
  • The web interface is operating properly on port 80 (if that is supported)
  • The web interface is operating properly on port 443 and the certificate is good.

This is a long way from a check that just monitors if a port is listening somewhere. It is the full set of checks that together help to ensure a healthy email system. We continue to extend our monitoring service and make our checks smarter, with the goal to take as much of the manual busy work out of the hands of busy administrators and allow them to focus on tasks that use their actual skills.

If you are responsible for email servers and haven’t added NodePing’s monitoring to your tool set yet, sign up for our free trial and give a try!

Filed under Email, POP, RBL, SMTP, SSL, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

RBL Monitoring

2013/01/15 by Leave a comment

What better way to top off our email monitoring enhancements than with a new check type! We’re happy to introduce our RBL check.

RBL, or DNSBL, stands for “Real-time Black List,” and is used to publish the addresses of computers or networks linked to spamming, malware, or other abuses which system administrators may want to block from accessing their networks.

There are hundreds of RBLs in existence, which use a wide array of criteria for listing and delisting of addresses. These may include listing the addresses of zombie computers or other machines being used to send spam, listing the addresses of ISPs who willingly host spammers, or listing addresses which have sent spam to a honeypot system.

If the IP addresses of your servers appear on these RBLs, there’s a good chance you’ll have difficulty interacting with networks that subscribe to these RBLs. For instance, if your SMTP server is listed, you’ll likely be unable to send email to the systems that use the RBL you are listed on.

You can use our new RBL check to ensure that your servers aren’t listed and to receive notifications if they do get listed, allowing you to quickly take steps to remove your addresses from those RBLs. You can find more details about which RBLs we check and how to set them up in our RBL Check documentation.

Adding RBL checking to our already robust email monitoring checks for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 will help you sleep at night knowing that email is flowing as it should be.

RBL monitoring checks are available to all NodePing accounts. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for your free 15-day trial of our server monitoring service.

Filed under Email, Monitoring, NodePing Updates, RBL, SMTP Tagged with , , , ,

IMAP Monitoring Enhancements

2013/01/09 by Leave a comment

On the heels of our SMTP enhancement release, we’re happy to add some significant features to our IMAP server monitoring check. IMAP refers to one of the two most popular methods of email retrieval, the other being POP. IMAP4 services are supported by nearly all email clients and its use continues to grow.

We’ve added the following enhancements:

  • Non-standard ports. Specify any port, not just IMAP default port 143
  • SSL/TLS support.
  • SSL certificate validation
  • SSL certificate expiration warnings – configurable to X days before expiration
  • User login verification.

It’s easier than ever to ensure your IMAP services are available and configured correctly. Find more information about the new enhancements in our documentation.

The new IMAP enhancements are available to all NodePing accounts today. If you don’t have a NodePing server monitoring account yet you can sign up for a free 15-day trial.

Next check on the block for more enhancements – you guessed it – POP3. I hear there’s a RBL check in the works too! Keep an eye out here on the blog for the announcements.

Filed under Email, IMAP, Monitoring, NodePing Updates Tagged with , , ,