Update 9th May 2017:

Worth noting that I received a couple of what I’d consider pushy emails from Manage Protect, beware of this if you decide to sign up.

Original Post:

I get a lot of sales emails asking me to blog about a product, which usually I ignore. However, EveryCloud’s email sounded interesting:

EveryCloud has launched a Free Mail Flow Monitor, that checks an 

organisations Email is flowing 24/7 and alerts users to problems.

Current services like this cost around $30 Per Month ($360 Per Year) Per Domain.

Free for Partner and End Users.

This will be the only free service of it’s kind.

You can watch a video here

You can view the full release here.

This is discussion about Free Mail Flow Monitor in Reddit

Free is a good price, but often these deals are too good to be true. I found their FAQ page to hopefully answer what catch there was:

OK, so it’s actually free, and it makes sense why they’re doing this. It’s simple and light, and alerts you if an email doesn’t go in and out of your organisation that’s sent every 5 minutes.

I decided to test this on my personal Office 365 instance. After signing up, you’re given the instructions on what’s required. The main part is to set up a mail address that forwards emails back to them.

Not wanting to use up an Office 365 license, I found a guide on “How To Forward Office 365 Email Address To External Address Without A Mailbox” which is very simple to do, it’s just setting up a mail user contact that goes to an external email address . As the guide points out, you’ll need to wait hours before it works. For me, I had another step to do as I had a catchall on my domain. I added an exception to the catchall rule for the address set up, waited a bit, and it started working. There’s a nice ‘test’ button that will send an email on demand while you wait, and confirm if the round trip works or not.

Once that’s done, you can then access the dashboard.

Beyond the uptime information, you can also create a policy on how to receive alerts when there’s a mail flow problem – email, sms or call.

I’ll keep this running because it’s free and handy to know when your mail flow breaks (even if it’s something out of your control). As with any free service though, it shouldn’t be the only way to rely on finding out if you’ve got an outage; how do you know if the service is working?

Still, it seems to be a clean and well designed solution to a problem that all email admins face, and I can’t see any downside to using this handy service.

* Monitor picture source
** This is not a sponsored post, I just liked the product.