Email Problems - Causes and Solution

I can safely assume that you already know how e-mail works. The main problem occurs when it does not work. And it doesn’t matter if you manage your business or if you’re a simple executive — if your email doesn’t work, you lose information. Most businesses have at least one email outage during the year, and, in many cases, these are losses, which, given the restoration of normal mail operation, can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

But what causes email outages?
There are many reasons why the e-mail system may stop working, but first we’ll stop by saying that e-mail downtime can be scheduled and unplanned.

Scheduled outages are when your email system is closed for maintenance or update. Patch management, physical server relocation, or system shutdown for testing can also be placed in this category.

Unlike scheduled email downtime, unplanned downtime can take you by surprise. They, too, are much more difficult to accurately diagnose. When such a problem arises, its causes can range from hardware or software problems to a hacker attack, or human error, which can cause incorrect system operation. Natural phenomena and various accidents should also not be neglected.
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A recent survey showed that about 70% of unplanned downtime is caused by hardware or software problems, such as server failures, communication breaks and database corruption.

That is why it is so important to know the status of your mail system around the clock. The best way to do this is to monitor your email consistently with a round-trip 2-step session test letter, which ensures that both your incoming and outgoing mail services are working properly at both ends.
This type of monitoring is usually carried out according to the following scenario:
The monitoring mail agent will connect to the outgoing (SMTP) mail server, send a test message, and then connect and log in to your incoming (POP3 or IMAP) server and try to receive a message. If the message is received, then the check was successful, and the message will be deleted from the mail system. If the message cannot be received, the test will be considered invalid and alerts will be sent to the specified contacts.
Of course, there are other possible scenarios, but we will get to know them more closely in our next posts.

In this case, your email is constantly monitored, which reduces your system’s downtime by almost 80% (compared to systems without monitoring and error reporting services). It also significantly reduces the troubleshooting time for email applications, and therefore minimizes the cost of restoring their functionality. In addition, the risk of losing or delaying valuable e-mail messages is eliminated, which undoubtedly has a positive effect when communicating with your customers and partners.