This help page is for version 6.2. The latest available help is for version 9.4.
Acknowledge Alerts via Email
If your organization tracks alerts via Error Auditing, then being able to acknowledge an
alert by simply replying to an email is a useful feature. When this feature is enabled:
- Each alert is assigned a unique ID
- Emails have the alert ID appended to the subject like this: "Server is down {id:431}"
- The alert email will come from a special email address that you specify
- When support staff receive the email alert, they can simply reply to the mail, indicating they acknowledge it. Nothing special needs to be in the message body.
- The mail box where the replied-to alert goes is scanned for incoming messages
- Arriving messages are checked for the special ID in the subject
- If the message has the ID, that alert is acknowledged using the From: field of the message, and the acknowledgement email is deleted to keep the mail box clean.
Configuration
Configuring this is very easy. First, you need to create or choose an existing email mail box that will receive the alert acknowledgement emails.
The configuration is available under the Advanced Services group as shown below.
The configuration dialog asks for typical email account information that will allow it to look at the received email messages.
Once Email Acknowledgement is enabled, email alerts will have the ID appended to the subject.
Additional Control
Alerts will not be acknowledged if the reply is an "Auto-Submitted" message, such as a vacation notice. These are detected by the AUTO-SUBMITTED email header that should be
present according to RFC 3834.
You can futher control which emails count or don't count as an acknowledgement by changing the following registry values:
- Mail_Ack_Keyword - A comma delimited list of keywords to search for. If a keyword contains a * character, the word can be a partial match. So GO* could match GONE or GOING for example. If these keywords are seen, the email is acknowledged. If no keywords are defined (the default case), simply replying to the alert email will acknowledge it.
- Mail_Ack_Skip_Keyword - Also a comma delimited list of keywords. If a keyword in this list is found, the reply email does not trigger an alert acknowledgement.
- Mail_AckAll_Keyword - A comma delimited list of keywords that defaults to ACKALL. If a keyword from this list is seen, all errors from the computer that sent the alert will be acknowledged.