Proactive Mail Management With MailCheck

By Nancy Cox  Nothing makes your blood curdle like a midnight phone call from the company president, demanding that you fix the mail system--now. Today's enterprise e-mail is highly complex, with messages traveling over a host of devices, communications paths and software applications. How do you manage such an intricate environment and still get some sleep? One way is to implement a robust application management package that lets you isolate problems, monitor the entire application and infrastructure, and automate problem resolution. Tally Systems Corp.'s MailCheck 4.0, which I tested in Network Computing's central Florida lab, provides all of this functionality and more. Fundamentally, MailCheck offers dual functionality--polling and monitoring. E-mail messages are transmitted to invalid addresses on distant servers at specified intervals. The return error messages are timed, generating alarm conditions when not received within the expected time frame. MailCheck also provides sophisticated management reports required for service-level compliance in most large installations. MailCheck runs on Windows 3.1 and higher, or DOS 3.3. My test environment featured Microsoft Exchange Server 5.0, Novell GroupWise 5.2 and Lotus Notes 4.6 on Compaq ProLiant 2500 servers running NT 4.0 SP3 over an Ethernet network. In each test, MailCheck faithfully polled the systems and returned alarms when the systems were unavailable to respond. I began testing at the Exchange Server and at the very next polling cycle, MailCheck reported a tardy (late response) condition. After I exceeded the warning threshold, MailCheck issued an alert and changed the status on the Monitor a nd Web status screens to "not responding." Poller, MailCheck 4.0's core component, is available in both 16-bit and 32-bit versions, while Monitor, its status component, is only offered in 16-bit. Native SMTP/POP3 support lets you use TCP/IP to communicate directly with your Internet e-mail server. Version 4.0 also offers expanded user rights, status-to-status rules and Web-enabled viewing of MailCheck polling status. Monitoring and Managing In a large enterprise, many people require up-to-the-minute status reports on how the entire messaging environment is functioning. Viewing status is one thing, but making changes to the system is a different story. Security against fundamental configurations, such as editing the Poller mailboxes or executing rules or deleting reports, is crucial. MailCheck's new security features include the ability to select from 12 different rights, which grant or deny permissions to individual users. MailCheck let me assign different actions to a mailbox status change, depending on both the old and new statuses. This functionality is particularly useful in cases where the old status shows a tardy condition. If the new status is returning to normal, then simply activating the pop-up alert window or an audible alert is sufficient. But if the monitored system's status changes from a tardy status to a "not responding" or disabled condition, you would want to be alerted immediately either by pager or an urgent e-mail message. The new Web Enabler feature let me view system configuration and status information from my Internet Explorer 4.0 browser. I instantly saw the status of all Poller mailboxes here, as well as the status of the Poller itself. Nancy Cox can be reached at ncox@nwc.com.

Other Sneak Previews Listen Up! Cisco Now Does Voice By David Willis I Want My 3Com OfficeConnect Router, Now! By Bruce Boardman RightFAX Enterprise Has All the Right Moves By Mike Fratto