Sending and receiving emails over the network involves the transmission of data to and from common application services such as network services and mail services. At the lower levels in the technology stack, email is sent to services identified by their well known port numbers. Between email clients and email servers the port number used is port 25 for sending emails over TCP/IP networks.

On most email servers, a background process, or daemon, will listen to port 25 for any incoming email. This is the port that clients make socket connections in order to be able to send their emails. Sometimes the port is blocked or unavailable on the email server.

When retrieving email from the server there is another port that can also be blocked and thus prevent emails from being receive. If port 110 is blocked then the client cannot pull down their messages.

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As an email administrator it is often asked of you to produce statistics showing how your email server is being utilized. This can be very important to IT departments that are run as their own profit and loss centers without the benefit of funding that comes out of the company budget. It is to any administrator’s advantage that they be able to run a set of comprehensive reports that will allow them to charge their customers an appropriate amount for their services.

Some of the reports that an email administrator should be able to run include:  the amount of messages sent and received by any department customer, statistics related to message size or number of receivers, delivery times – what week, day, time and other factors, reports based on distribution lists and reports based on protocols used.

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The Register reported that popular business ISP ClaraNet was down since early morning on April 3rd and estimated that that email service would be out until sometime late the following day at the earliest. ClaraNet said that service was partially restored – users could send and recieve email but c0uld not access any emails stored in their inboxes. The ISP say no emails have been lost.

          According to ClaraNet’s support site, incoming mail has not been lost, but is queued waiting to be delivered. The firm apologised for the inconvenience and targeted 6pm tomorrow for the restoration of full service.

The company has not publically explained the reason for the outage but some sources speculate that it was related to a failed RAID controller. Outages do happen, and it’s a good reminder to always have some sort of backup system in place just in case so that you can continue business as usual. Like electricity, you never realize just how much you depend on email until you’re suddenly cut off from it!

Another thing to remember in case of an outage is to communicate with your customers and vendors. Placing a notice on your website and/or on your company’s automated phone system is a good idea. A little communication goes a long way in building customer confidence and loyalty!

In any large organization there will come a time when the IT department will have to migrate their existing users to a new mail server. Lots of times this migration is a result of two companies merging their IT operations together. Other times the migration is driven by a company’s decision to standardize on one platform so as to simplify administration and reduce maintenance costs.

The migration can be made less painful for users if careful planning is performed during the initial stages. Many tools exist to convert mail folders from one format to another. For example, there are tools to convert from Outlook/Exchange mailbox and personal folders (.pst files) to the Domino server mailbox or local .nsf files

Or in the case of going from an existing IMAP server to Google Apps there are tools that help domain administrators transfer the contents of users mailboxes without risking the loss of existing mail. Of course having a recent backup is most important to insure against the loss of email. In addition, you want to verify that the migration tool you use will keep and/or display a log of each mail message migrated including the sender, receiver and date of the migrated email message.

Folder structures should also be preserved so that users can stay as productive as possible after email migrations. You don’t want users having to spend their time recreating the email folders they use for staying organized nor having to repopulate their email folders from backup. You want to make the transition as smooth as possible.

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As an IT administrator you have to make sure your servers are up and running at all times, with email being so critical to the business as users communicate via email for almost everything.  You want to make sure you search for a good, easy-to-install monitoring solution.  The first question you have to ask yourself is what you really need in monitoring software.  To begin with you want to check the health of the system and the performance, check the email traffic and see if there are problems.

You do not want a call from the end users alerting you that a problem has occurred.  You want to be a step ahead and by having a system that can alert you of a potential problem would be ideal.  You can be alerted either via email, SMS or a mobile device.  Another aspect is to minimize the downtime of a server.  The software should be able to take corrective action if a potential problem arises.  The corrective action can be set on certain criteria that you set up before hand, such as restarting a service or do a server reboot.

Continue reading Tips for Managing your Email Servers