Email

Email has become an accepted means of communicating with your clients and your clients are happy to communicate with you via email. This means that any email addresses on your website need to work effectively to ensure good customer service.

Email problems

There are several ways that problems with your email system can impact your business. There can be problems with failing email addresses or problems with your email servers that impact your users.

The most common problem is failing email addresses. These can arise by email addresses being removed from the email system when someone leaves or somebody decides to remove a generic email address (say, inquiries@sitemorse.com). Or perhaps the email address was misspelt. Either way emails from your customers won't get through.

Your email servers may also cause problems. Generally organisations have multiple email servers, e.g. a primary server and a backup server. Emails will always be sent to the primary server unless there's a problem in which case email is automatically routed to the backup email server.  Because temporary blips in service rarely cause a problem, as email servers will try to resend emails for some time before giving up, you may not be aware of problems. This is particularly true of your back-up servers that normally only receive emails when there is a problem with your primary email servers.

Sitemorse email testing

What do we test?

We test all email addresses included in "mailto:" links we find on the website (including any in PDFs that we find). We test all email servers that are defined within your email domain.

What sort of problems do we detect?

Amongst the common problems that we find are: typing mistakes in email addresses, email addresses that no longer exist, and mis-configured backup mail servers.  Some broken "mailto:" links can easily be detected - for example, "mailto:bill.sitemorse.com" is obviously incorrect because there is no "@" in the address. 

Mis-configured servers can be particularly hard to diagnose without Sitemorse's email testing, since the likely effect is that email will get through fine except when the main mail server is down when suddenly all email will start bouncing!

How do we test?

We look up each email address's domain in the DNS ("domain name system") to obtain the list of email servers for the domain. Each of these is the name of a server which will accept mail for the domain (e.g. "mail.sitemorse.com").

We connect to each of the mail servers and go through the "SMTP" conversation which computers go through when sending an email - stopping just before the point when an actual email would be sent. This establishes whether the email addresses are valid and whether all the email servers are capable of receiving emails.

Any error messages or problems seen are recorded.

Sitemorse email testing gives you the confidence that your email service is effective in serving your customers needs.

View larger "eMail Diagnostic" screen shot

1.1 - Summary of our findings

1.2 - The list of email address results

For each email address found, a status is provided - "satisfactory"," impaired" or "compromised" along with any error messages and where they appear on the site.

1.3 - The mail server detail

Shows status of each email server with any error messages and timings in graphical format

1.4 - "Test an email address now:"

Simple means fo testing email addresses to make sure they work OK.

1.5 - email syntax failures

1.6 - Other email domains found.

Clicking on a domain shows full details in right hand panel