Measuring outgoing/incoming email delay

[ncleartool]

Hi all,

Today we had an issue with our spam filter provider. Messages left the exchange servers fine but were delayed due to a problem with the spam filter service choking. Emails were delayed about 30 minutes going out and coming in. Naturally, we didn't realise this until a couple hours later.

So. I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how to get warning of this situation in future. Emails leave fine so it could never be detected internally (or could it?).

I was thinking of setting up a test exchange user account and a recipient gmail account set to forward any messages to the same account. If > 1 minute elapses, I know we have an issue. But, trying to program this seems non-trivial. Script to send, fine, but reading the reply from the mailbox seems tricky! I can find lots of mailbox status examples but no real close to the message output/input style scripts. I could possibly do it in VBA in outlook but this would mean a computer sitting doing this all day doing potentially nothing else. Is there a better way?

Cheers!

 

[Shad007]

When you say choking do you mean it stopped altogether or it just slowed to a crawl?...if so there are plenty of programs available for monitoring network services and alerting if they stop or if it was just struggling perhaps you could find out if a queue of mail is building somewhere and alert if it reaches a certain value?

food for thought.

 

[ncleartool]

Hi,

Thanks for reply. What I mean is that the email leaves our organisation and is sent to our spam filter service. So it leaves our end totally, no mail queues etc... The problem was completely invisible to us and only realised when someone commented that an email they sent to a personal address took an hour.

I have found a couple of slight workarounds since. One is called mailping hich seems to have disppeared, though I did find an article explaining how to integrate it into nagios (which we use, yah!).

http://lopsa.org/node/625

Also, I considered writing a VBA macro in outlook to chek receive but getting time to do it is a little tricky! If I ever do one, i'll be sure to post it here.

Cheers
Iain

 

[Zelandakh]

If you have a spam filter service, there must be an SLA. Therefore they must provide a tool for checking. Start by asking them to provide stats and alerts.

 

[ncleartool]

Hi Zelandakh,

Yes, good idea, I will look into that. But, hte trouble is, should the email be delayed I imagine the alert will also be subject to delays, or possibly not arrive! Will ask about this so thanks for the suggestion anyway.

But, I would feel a tad more comfortable having my own independent check

Cheers