Notify me when an e-mail doesn't show up?

[lawman]

Our company is moving to Outlook 2007 next week. I was wondering if anyone
knew of a program, add-on, free-ware, share-ware, etc... that could monitor a
generic e-mail account looking for specific e-mails sent daily and notify me
if an e-mail doesn't show up. Each e-mail has a unique subject line. We
won't to have something that will monitor the e-mail and alert us when a
Business Objects Report doesn't get e-mailed to the general e-mail account
which would tell us the report failed to run.

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP (OneNote)]

You want it to tell you if an e-mail DOESN'T show up? How would it know
when one was supposed to show up? I mean, I don't get e-mails all the
time - but it's not usually significant enough a non-event to require
notifying anybody. ;-)

Could you maybe just have the report cc'd to you (or somebody else)?
Who is supposed to be looking at these e-mailed reports and wouldn't
they notice if one didn't arrive?

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com

 

[lawman]

We have 5,000 scheduled reports that Business Objects runs and it sends an
e-mail to a generic account after it finished running the report. We have
specific subjet lines we are looking for. So we need something that can look
for these specific subject lines and tell us when the e-mail doesn't show up.
Otherwise we are going through pages and pages checking off every day to
figure out which reports didn't show up.

-Travis

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Outlook is not a system monitoring tool. Can't you simply configure BO to
only send a report when the report finishes with an error?

 

[DL]

I'd have thought that if an application runs a specific task then that
application might produce a task log file, or even email, or otherwise
notifies, if that task fails.
Much like my backup app which gives both a log file after it has run,
together with an email msg if there has been any failure - The raid
controler I use does the same, for any events I have selected

 

[lawman]

The biggest issue is when Business Objects itself goes down. If the BO
server goes down, there is no way for BO to notify us of a failure. I know
Outlook can't monitor anything. I am wondering if there is a plug in, or
third part software that might be able to do the monitoring.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Sure you can. When BO goes down, so does the process. This triggers an event
which can alert you by pretty much any method that you want. It will also
mean that there will be no emails at all in your mailbox. Also I'm sure all
your users will start screaming. So basically, the mail monitoring that you
want is a non-issue when it comes to monitoring the heartbeat of your BO
server.

Any Outlook based solution that you want would mean it needs to be custom as
it is a check-off list against another list of mails that should be
expected. Your answer is not looking for an Outlook based method but for a
proper system monitoring tool that can alert you via Outlook.