How do I know whether my company’s emails are arriving?
By sending a real email and checking that it arrived. In Monitor, an email check uses a test address of your company, a mailbox nobody reads. By default, every hour, 2N5’s sender emails it a message, Monitor looks for that message in the mailbox, and records how long it took to arrive and which folder it landed in. That answers the question of anyone who depends on email: can the people writing to us reach us?
How does the round-trip test work?
- Send. Monitor sends the test address a plain message, with no links, images, or trackers. The sender is named “Monitor by 2N5”, and the subject is in Portuguese when the address ends in
.brand in English otherwise. The message carries an identifier unique to that round, in a header and on the last line of the text. - Look. About once a minute, Monitor searches the mailbox for that identifier, the spam folder included.
- Verdict. It reached the inbox: passed. It landed in spam or arrived after the check’s allowed time: degraded. It did not appear in fifteen minutes: Monitor sends another test and, if that one does not arrive either, opens an incident.
- Clean-up. The message that was found goes to trash at once, along with any earlier test that arrived late. Nobody at the company sees a test.
Each round keeps the delivery time and the result of the sender checks made by the receiving server (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), so that a spam result can say why.
What kinds of mailbox can Monitor follow?
| Account type | What Monitor does |
|---|---|
| Google account or Google Workspace | Whoever administers the mailbox signs in with Google once, through a connect link valid for 7 days, and Monitor then looks in it for the test message. No server, port or password is asked for |
| Sending only (SMTP) | Reads no mailbox: each round, the company’s own outgoing server sends one test from that address to a 2N5 mailbox, where Monitor looks for it, inbox or spam, and deletes it. It reads down when the server cannot be reached, will not encrypt, refuses the login, refuses to send, or the test does not arrive, and degraded when it lands in spam |
| Mailbox from another provider, over IMAP | Reads the mailbox with a login and password, the spam folder included, and can also check that the company can send, as above, with the same login |
In practice, 2N5 does the setup with you, as with the rest of the managed service. The mail provider is always the one your company already uses.
What happens when the mailbox fills up?
When the mailbox reports its space used and its limit, or you enter its size, Monitor shows the percentage used and compares it with two marks on each check:
- Warning mark: the responsible people are told once each time the mark is crossed, and the check stays up.
- Alert mark: the check starts failing and climbs the escalation ladder. The same goes for a test that comes back bounced because the mailbox is full.
Without a known limit, Monitor shows only the size, never an invented percentage. At 100%, anyone writing to the address gets a bounce, and the warning screen reminds you to free space or raise the quota with the provider.
Which alerts does your team receive?
An email that does not arrive opens an incident and triggers the escalating alerts: email to the first tier, with one-tap acknowledgment, and a climb tier by tier if nobody takes ownership. When messages arrive again, your company’s contacts are told it is resolved.
Spam, delay, and a nearly full mailbox are warnings. They inform the contacts without waking the ladder. A maintenance window silences the check during planned work.
How does email appear in the report?
The monthly report includes the email check on its online services page: availability, calculated like the data circuits’, the share of tests that reached the inbox, and the delivery time. The same SLA logic applies: an outage is downtime, a warning is shown but does not count, and time when 2N5 could not check is left out of the calculation.
What does email monitoring not do?
The test confirms that email sent to the company arrives. It does not measure whether the messages the company sends land in other people’s inboxes. For the company’s website, see website monitoring.
Frequently asked questions
Does the test email land in the inbox?
That is what is expected, and Monitor checks it. If the test lands in spam or arrives later than the check allows, the result reads degraded, a warning that does not climb the ladder. The test is written like an ordinary email, with no links or images, and is deleted as soon as it is found.
What happens when the mailbox fills up?
The check reads the space used and compares it with two marks, a warning and an alert. At the warning mark, people are told once and the check stays up. At the alert mark it starts failing and climbs the ladder, because with a full mailbox anyone writing to the company gets a bounce.
Does anyone at the company have to read the test emails?
No. The test address is a mailbox nobody reads, and each message is moved to trash as soon as it is found, along with any earlier test that arrived late. The test text says it is automatic and needs no reply.
Does Monitor check the emails my company sends?
The round-trip test confirms that email sent to the company arrives. Optionally, Monitor also checks sending: it logs in to the company's outgoing server and asks it to accept a message from that address, but it stops before anything is sent.
Does a problem on 2N5's side count as email being down?
No. If 2N5's sender cannot send the test, or the mailbox can no longer be read, the result is recorded as not judged: it does not count against your company, and 2N5 is the one notified. That way, your team is only woken by problems that really affect the company's email.
How do I monitor email delivery with round-trip tests?
Send a test email to a company mailbox on a schedule and check where it landed. Monitor by 2N5 sends one test email an hour, confirms whether it reached the inbox or the spam folder, and deletes it right after. If it does not arrive, arrives late or the mailbox is filling up, your team is alerted before customers complain.