When you are involved with maintaining email service, you make sure that you have tools at your disposal for troubleshooting purposes. If you are maintaining a larger email type system, such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, there are built-in and third party applications to help with maintenance and error checking. Even if you email services are top notch, there can be other factors that affect performance in one way or another.
Hopefully, if you are in the position where you have to track issues with email services, you have the right type of monitoring in place to alert you in case of a service outage. If email services are down, you want to be the first person to know. Should others are calling in attempting to find out what happened, you are able to inform them of the outage.
Trying to correct an issue with an internal email server may be easier for some, because you have direct knowledge about the operation of the machine. Outsourced email services could be a little more difficult because you are relying on an external service provider. Perhaps they claim that there services are up and running, but your end users are not getting their email.
At this point, you need to do some troubleshooting for confirmation purposes. If your are comfortable with typing out the EHLO routine from the command prompt, by all means, use it. It is not too difficult to use and has been around for quite a while. If you prefer a more graphical look and feel though, TestMailer is a program worth looking at.
TestMailer (found here) is an inexpensive program, which can test for a handful of problems, while acting as an SMTP server. This software can spot check email service communication, verify MX records, and send test emails messages without the need for email service. It can also generate a text report of its results to save for reference purposes.
When you open up TestMailer, all of the options you will need are in the main window. If you simply want to send out a test message, you may focus on the Basic Settings area. Type in a From address, a To address, a Subject, and a brief message (optional) in the provided text box.
When ready to send the test message, click on the Send Message button at the bottom of the TestMailer window. The results of the test will be displayed in the right hand portion of the TestMailer window. You will know quickly if the message was successful or not.
In this instance, you will note that the message did not go through. The response error, “451 Internal resource temporarily unavailable”, means that the receiving mail server has rejected this message for a number of reasons.
The server itself may be offline, the email services could be offline, or it could also be that the server is being overloaded with messages. Though your message was unsuccessful, this type of data is valuable when communicating with other technical support staff, and is much better than a simple non-delivery response.
Beyond sending simple messages, you may also use TestMailer to add specific data in the email’s header fields using the Advanced Settings area. You can also format an HTML body, add attachments, and choose between using simple ehlo, or using specified usernames and passwords.
This time we will try and send a test message in an attempt to get a response from the GMail SMTP service. We will manually add the smtp.gmail.com host in the SMTP host field, instead of the default Auto Resolve. To make this particular message unique, we will purposefully change the date and time to a false, but specific, information set.
After the message is sent, the results section first shows the communications with the resolution of GMail’s MX records. After the MX records, it will attempt to connect and send our message.
At the bottom of these results, we see (noted in blue) that our message was transmitted successfully. You will also notice that our preset date and time also carried through attached to the email.
Now that we are finished and received the results, a file should be created showing a successful, or unsuccessful, attempt. Should a problem like this arise in the future, this data can serve as reference material. To save the response (format is rich text), click on the Save Communication button in the lower right-hand corner of Test Mailer.
Though larger Information Technology shops might employ more complex troubleshooting tools, TestMailer is a very practical tool for field technicians, or even in-house support staff. The simple interface and quick responsiveness makes this software a good choice for a technician’s, or system administrator’s, utility set.
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