The world of email security is experiencing a boost with the emergence of new technologies. Now, you can monitor and evaluate the whole trip your email makes from your outbox to the recipient’s inbox. Not particularly sure how? No worries! We are here to cover everything you need to know about email round-trip monitoring. Also, we will explain why every company (despite the industry they are operating in) should implement email round-trip monitoring.

What is email round-trip monitoring?

Before moving further to the reasons why you need email round-trip monitoring, let’s first cover the basics.

Email round-trip monitoring, ERT monitoring, or mail flow monitoring allows you to audit the performance of the end-to-end email delivery process. Thus, you can make sure that both incoming and outgoing services are operating properly.

How does it work?

Once you have enabled Email round-trip monitoring, it will start sending a test message to your email address with a particular time interval. Then, it is being retrieved from your mail server while your email sends a reply message. This whole process allows detecting any errors in the process of receiving and sending emails.

For detailed information read How Email Round-Trip Test Works

Why does every company need email round-trip monitoring?

No matter whether you own an online store, company website, or an event website, you will benefit from implementing mail flow monitoring. Here are five reasons why.

Risk detection and security

Risk detection and assessment are vital aspects of security management. This part of email safety is integral for any company despite the industry of operation. Let us show you how monitoring your mail flow will contribute to the overall security and safety of your company.

Email monitoring allows you to monitor the performance and availability of a complete email delivery process. It also implies that you can detect any possible risks or threats to your email security. For example, this kind of monitoring can help you identify whether your employees share sensitive data with unauthorized people and thus compromises security. Additionally, constant monitoring will help you detect any security breaches as it scans the whole process.

Proper risk assessment allows you and your security professionals to timely identify and reduce the risk of potential threats, such as a data leak.

Operation management

Operation management is another key benefit of ERT monitoring. Operation management is a process that involves managing and controlling the functionality of your business. The application of operation management is universal for companies engaging in all industries. That is why it is essential to make sure you have an excellent strategy for managing your email operations.

Email round-trip monitoring is a great solution for the purpose mentioned above. Since it allows you to ensure delivery of emails from and to your email server, you can have full control over all operations happening from end to end. Also, ERT monitoring systems check how your internet connection is performing. Your email’s filtering system will be tested, as well.

With email flow monitoring, you can identify delayed or lost emails. After careful assessment, the monitoring system will help you detect the problem. This feature is extremely useful as you will be able to fix any existing bugs. This will contribute not only to your operation management efforts but also to the overall security.

Accountability and policy enforcement

Email round-trip monitoring services provide valuable data in dedicated security and operational reports. It is crucial that you, as an entrepreneur, use this data to improve your company’s accountability and policy enforcement. Let us show you how.

Lack of security education is one of the most common obstacles that contribute to data loss and other security breaches. You can use data obtained as a result of ERT monitoring to improve security education practices for your employees. You can use real-life examples to showcase your points during staff training programs.

Additionally, you need to know whether your employees are following the best security practices. The more general email monitoring is extremely helpful in that. You want to make sure that your employees do not use their work email for personal purposes, like private communications or subscriptions. If your employees exercise this kind of behavior, they (not necessarily on purpose) put your company in the risk of a data breach. Make sure to implement general email monitoring efforts (besides email round-trip monitoring) into your email security strategy to improve your safety standards.

Opportunities for further improvement

As you have already learned, email round-trip monitoring helps you to evaluate whether your email is working correctly or not. This means that if any flaws were detected in the monitoring process, you would be able to learn more about them and adjust accordingly. Every company (despite the industry they’re working in) aims to improve their email efforts. That is why using email flow monitoring for identifying the areas of improvement is a viable solution for any business.

Keeping a pulse on the key metrics is key if you want your business to succeed. With ERT monitoring, you will be able to track important email performance metrics, like the average response time, uptime, and downtime. This data will help you properly evaluate your email strategy and performance so that you can make improvements more strategically.

Improved customer service

If you’re working with customers, your brand’s success majorly depends on the quality of the customer service you offer. If you use email to reach your clients, email round-trip monitoring should be a part of your performance evaluation efforts.

Simply sending emails to your customers is not enough. You want to make sure that each of the emails you’ve sent reached recipients’ inboxes. ERT monitoring checks whether your email server can reach the outside world of customer email servers. This aspect is critical because it helps you to ensure all of your emails have reached customers. Also, this feature is extremely important if you send a lot of marketing emails to a large number of recipients. Email flow monitoring will help you ensure that all emails are sent and received on time.

Wrapping up

If email-round trip monitoring is not included in your data security and performance evaluation strategies, you are missing out on a lot of critical benefits. The main objective of email round-trip monitoring is to check for incoming and outgoing system issues. This will help you boost the performance of your email campaign, decrease the risk of security breaches, and improve your overall email efforts.