Knowledge Front’s round-trip SMTP (also known as Mailive!) is a round-trip email transaction. We send you a test message and you forward it back to us at mailive@knowledgefront.com. We track the round trip time, record any errors, and alert you to problems or delays.
You will need to set up what is commonly known as an auto-forwarder or auto-responder. See Round Trip SMTP Monitor Setup Help for how to set up the response on several of the most popular email servers
Test messages are sent from the following IP Addresses
Delivery method:
- Direct to IP address or Hostname
- The SMTP connection will be made directly to the given IP or hostname. No MX record look-up will be performed.
- Use Primary MX Record
- Connections will be made to the primary MX record returned from a DNS look-up. If there are multiple records with the same weight the tests will round-robin between the records
- Use MX Lookup with failover
- Using DNS tests will be delivered according to the weight of the MX records. If a TCP connection error (timeout) or other non-fatal SMTP error occurs the same test will try on the next weighted MX record. This closely mimics the behavior of a typical mail server delivery.
The choice as to whether Transport Layer Security should be used to deliver the test. There are three options:
On: Delivery will always use TLS and record a failure if the STARTTLS command does not succeed or if the SMTP transmission fails to complete in any way. Auto: When the SMTP session begins the system sends the EHLO command to the SMTP server being tested and the response includes the capabilities of the SMTP Server. If STARTTLS is in the response then the test will attempt to use TLS and record a failure if the session breaks or the delivery does not succeed. If there is no STARTTLS then delivery happens the old fashioned way, with no encryption Off: When sending a test e-mail the system will never attempt to initiate TLS, even if advertised in the EHLO response of the receiving server.
Attachment:
- None
- No attachment is included with the tests
- Word (docx)
- Attach a unique Microsoft Word document to each test message. This can help test content and virus filter to ensure they are working. The document itself will be different for every test as will the document name.
- PDF Document
- Creates and attaches a unique PDF document to each test message. Document name and contents will be different for each test.