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I am on Ubuntu 12.04 using Thunderbird as email client. Both are up to date in terms of updates.
I have bunch of nightly jobs that do the work and send a status mail. It gets tedious if you keep getting same/similar mails every day so I ended up writing a mail filter rule which causes emails to end up in their respective folders automatically. If things are going ok, I really don't need to read emails. Failure emails are sent to different alias - if the job runs.
We recently discovered that one of the job had not run for few days as someone accidentally disabled it. In order to avoid such problems in future, I would like to setup thunderbird in such a way that if I don't get email from given address within given duration, it should alert me. My dream solution is to set up frequency - some jobs do run every 4 hours.
Is this possible? Can I setup Thunderbird (preferred) or other email client for reminding me when expected email does not show up.
Based on comments and answer I received, here are the reasons why I would like to use Thunderbird.
- We are already using Thunderbird. It has calender support via plugin, so I suppose someone is already watching time to remind us about the event. May be this another type of event.
- Additional job is one more failure point, may complicate life if it has to monitor multiple hosts.
- Additional tools - same thing, one more failure point.
- Thunderbird can be run across all the platforms we are using - Windows and Ubuntu. It sort of becomes platform independent solution.
2I would do this the other way around - if the job completes successfully, it writes a success log somewhere. Then you have another job that checks the success log, and emails if any of the jobs haven't completed in the expected time. – Paul – 2013-08-19T00:56:52.403
Agreed with @paul, handle this on server side. You can change email client (or use Gmail), and your service still getting monitored properly. – Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan – 2013-08-19T06:46:34.647
@Paul,Raslan, I see where you are coming from. However from maintenance perspective its one more job. If the jobs are running from different hosts, it adds some more complexity. From my perspective, I am already using thunderbird, its running most of the times I am logged on to the box. If I can do it in thunderbird, I don't have additional complexity of extra tools or jobs. – user871199 – 2013-08-19T18:54:21.000