Why is the Email alerts option greyed out

If you try to configure an Email alert and the “Add” button on “Step 4 – Setup Email Notifications” page is greyed out as show on the image to the right, it is because you have not configured an Email relay for IsItUp to use. IsItUp composes and sends alert messages to the mail relay which then sends the mail alerts on to its final destination. The Email relay can be a local mail server or any of the public mail servers such as Google or Yahoo. In order to insure that the Email alerts are reliably sent, it is recommended that a backup Email relay be configured as well. Then in case of a failure of the primary mail server, IsItUp will automatically switch to the backup mail relay.

A very common configuration is for IsItUp to use the organizations mail server as its primary for alerts and also monitor the primary mail server for failures. Alerts would then be sent through the primary Email server unless it failed. IsItUp would in that case switch to the backup Email server. A public mail server could be used as the backup. Of course if the network goes down, neither the primary nor the secondary mail relay will work. In that case, it is recommended that a modem and phone line be connected to the PC that IsItUp is running on. In order to detect a network failure, set up a device monitor to a resource on the internet such as one of the public time servers found here http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi# or use nist1-ny.ustiming.org. This monitor will only fail if the PC IsItUp is running on no longer has access to the internet. That will generally mean that your network is down. Of course there is the possibility that the internet resource you are monitoring is down but if you select a reliable resource, that will be rare. IsItUp would then send a page to your cell phone informing you of the outage.

To quickly get started, first:

Download and install IsItUp for a free 30 day trial. Just click on the following link:

http://www.tarosoft.com/applications/IsItUp.exe

Once you have installed IsItUp, you can configure the email relay either during the setup wizard the first time you run IsItUp or by selecting Setup/System parameters from the main menu and then the “Setup Mail System Parameters” tab. In either case the setup dialog will look like the image shown below :

Like all IsItUp dialogs, instructions are given on the screen and generally, a help button is available. For the mail system, you can select either MAPI or Internet Email. However, you can only configure a backup if you select Internet Email. The sample configuration shows the organization’s Email server as the primary (in this case, Taro Software’s server) and Gmail as the backup. Because Gmail requires authentication, you must provide a user name and password as well as encryption. To configure these settings, select the “Settings” button. A sample configuration for Gmail is show below: