How it Works

DIGIT Email Round Trip tests your email system's ability to both send and receive email on a configurable periodic basis. Our system is vendor agnostic and as such works with every email platform. This real world test confirms the correct operation of many systems, both inside and outside of your control, upon which successful email communications are dependent:

Domain Registration
DNS Hosting
DNS MX Record Correctness
Outsourced Message Hygiene Systems (Mimecast, Message Labs, Webroot, MailGuard)
Internet connectivity of your mail server
Firewall Configuration
SMTP Receive Connector / Port Binding
Information Store Mounted / Aliases file configured correctly

Sending ERT Emails

Our servers send emails to your nominated test address at an interval (5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) you define.

Responding to ERT Emails

To conduct a true end to end test we require confirmation that our email was safely received by your mail server, processed and delivered to the destination mailbox. The best way for us to know this for sure if for your mail server to acknowledge receipt by replying to our original message as soon as it arrives.

It is for this reason why users of DIGIT ERT configure an automatic reply, forward or redirection of messages received from our servers.

Receiving your ERT Replies

When our servers receive your ERT response we perform analysis of the email and update our records that it has safely made a successful round trip.

When we don't hear back from your server after a time period determined by you we follow your escalation process to let you know that something's afoot.

Delivery Delay Analysis Tools

Our web console allows users to review each round trip message and understand the exact cause of each delivery delay. We provide messaging administrators the following diagnotic features:

Address Monitor Sending History Including Mesage Delivery Round Trip Time
Access to an generated Non Delivery / Delayed Delivery Reports for review
Message Headers for detailed analysis
Raw SMTP logs for both outbound and inbound transations for each round trip message

Global Server Network, Regional Fault Tolerance & False Positive Reduction

We have servers located in North America, Europe and Australia which form our global network. This design provides us the ability to reduce the chance of false positive alerts by automatically testing from alternate regions when an ERT response hasn't been received within a 10 minute period.