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A mail forwarding service that lets you monitor your mail servers to ensure that they are up-and-running.
The concept of AMMS is simple -- you download an open source software package called "amms-utils" and install it. amms-utils periodically sends a small specially formatted "ping mail" to us at the "ping address", which we will acknowledge by forwarding it to a "pong address" on your server. The pong address is usually wired to amms-utils in order to match against sent ping mails, and alert you out-of-band if any ping mails have not been acknowledged within a configured amount of time.
Email is an essential communication tool these days. We rely on it for practically everything. However, like its real life counterpart - the postal service, it is an inherently unreliable transport1. Email uses a distributed architecture, an email message travels through any number of intermediate servers before reaching its recipients. The distributed architecture is essential for scalability and fault tolerance. Ironically, this causes reliability problems because it is difficult to find out if your email has been delivered, or is stuck on a mail server somewhere. Various mechanisms to counter these problems and provide status feedback to the original sender, but they are advisory only - it is up to the administrators at each intermediate mail system to implement them 2. There is a parallel problem to the sending picture, that is receiving. As an end user, the last thing you want is to miss mails. If someone sends you an email and your ISP's mail server has problem delivering to you (perhaps due to a full mailbox or the server is too busy scanning virii), there will be no sign of anything wrong on your end, except that no new emails are coming through.
AMMS is created with the mail server administrator in mind. If you own or manage a domain that receives mails, you might want to use this service to ensure that your mail server is doing its job. You need to be fairly comfortable in a UNIX environment in order to install amms-utils.
If you are an existing user, and wish to change the pong address or other aspects of your account, please log in here.