Introduction to Inbound and Outbound Email

Download this manual as a PDF file

This section is intended for system administrators responsible for configuring SL1. SL1 can receive email messages from external sources and process those messages to trigger events, create tickets, and monitor the speed of email servers. It can also send email messages, either automatically for a number of different scenarios or manually at a user's discretion in some other scenarios.

This section describes how to configure SL1 to process inbound and outbound email. You must configure the inbound and outbound email settings before configuring events from email, tickets from email, or email round-trip monitoring policies.

Use the following menu options to navigate the SL1 user interface:

  • To view a pop-out list of menu options, click the menu icon ().
  • To view a page containing all of the menu options, click the Advanced menu icon ().

Infrastructure Requirements

To use the inbound email functions of SL1, you must configure your IT infrastructure so that at least one DNS MX record maps to the IP address of the Database Server or All-In-One Appliance. If a DNS MX record does not exist for the IP address of your Database Server or All-In-One Appliance, no email will be delivered to SL1. If you are not responsible for DNS records, ask your system administrator for help with this step.

Typically, the DNS MX record that maps to the IP address of the system will be a sub-domain of your primary domain. If you want email to be sent from outside your corporate network to your SL1 system, you might need to configure an externally accessible email address that forwards to the appropriate email address for the SL1 system. The general steps to do this in your email system are:

  1. Configure a new mailbox for an address that uses your primary domain. For example, "support@company.com".
  2. Create a mail contact for the address used by your SL1 system. For example, "ticket@monitoring.company.com".
  3. Configure the mailbox you created in step 1 to automatically forward all mail to the contact you created in step 2.