Overview

Mail Flow in Mailprotector determines if you have healthy mail delivery or not. Under the Mail Flow tab, you will have options to set your notification thresholds, check live SMTP responses, and monitor a domain's delivery success rate.

The purpose of this section of the Console is to provide managers with the ability to perform live troubleshooting and be notified if there is an issue with a domain's mail flow.

This article will cover:

1. How We Determine Healthy Mail Flow
2. Setting Up Notifications
3. Troubleshooting Tools to Identify Mail Flow Problems
4. Common Situations and Solutions

How We Determine Healthy Mail Flow

The Mail Flow status indicates Good when the last 25 emails have delivered at 90% or better success, using default settings.

If 3 emails fail to deliver out of 25, the Mail Flow Status will change to Bad.

If you determine that mail flow is healthy for the domain, and the status is showing Bad, you may need to adjust the Delivery success rate threshold.

Setting Up Notifications

Notifications are enabled on a per manager account basis. Each manager needs to log into the Console and navigate to the Reseller, Customer, or Domain level, depending on the notifications required.

NOTE: If a manager wants to be notified, they will have to log in with their account to receive notifications. There isn't a way to enable this for all managers at the same time.

BEST PRACTICE: To receive notifications to a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool or other ticketing systems, create a manager account that has the ticketing system's email address. Log in with this manager account and enable the notifications needed.

Troubleshooting Tools to Identify Mail Flow Problems

When identifying mail flow issues, there are a few tools that all partners have at their disposal. Each of these tools can help identify why email is failing, and what actions you'll need to take to resolve the issue.

The Mail Flow Status Button

The Mail Flow Status button will display the current average delivery, current delivery delay, and the most recent SMTP response. 

If this option shows a successful email delivery with a 250 SMTP response, then there is most likely an intermittent issue. If the option shows a failed SMTP response, you will need to look up the error code and determine the correct course of action.

The Mail Flow Status "Live Logs"

"Live logs" can be seen by going to the Mail Flow tab under the domain and selecting the View Live button. The tool provides the most recent 25 deliveries/attempts for the domain. 

The logs indicate if the email was delivered (Green), deferred (Red), or bounced (Red). The information updates as email deliveries/attempts are performed from the transport servers. Filtering results are not present in this view.

NOTE: These logs are not in chronological order. They will update as Mailprotector's servers receive the SMTP response from the recipient's destination server. If you watch the live logs refresh, they are updated as deliveries/attempts are completed; not in chronological order. i.e., An email with a large attachment will take longer to deliver, but the time stamp on the SMTP response will be earlier than the actual delivery date and time.

The Logs Tab

The Logs tab provides all of the emails sent through Mailprotector for the domain being managed. Locate the emails that show the mail flow issues and navigate to the Timeline section.

The Timeline section of the log provides the full SMTP response needed for further troubleshooting.

The remainder of the log details may also be helpful.

Common Situations and Solutions

Many reasons exist for email delivery issues. Some of the most common email bouncebacks require contacting another serivce provider or examining the destination server. Typically, the bounceback error provides the best failure information to begin troubleshooting. If you see an error not answered by the common bounceback articles, please reach out to the Partner Success team.