It is very hard to imagine any company functioning without electronic mail today, as the service has become one of the most vital services for any business, and as a result e-mail monitoring has also become a must. If the company's e-mail system is not properly working, it will definitely cost that company some extra time and money in order to solve the problems. Web site monitoring services available on the market provide unique testing features and end-to-end e-mail infrastructure. The e-mail monitoring provides companies with the opportunity to observe the e-mail sending process and to check the messages delivery. These services provide monitoring and alerts about the function and dysfunctions of the server ability to send and receive e-mails. This way one can be sure that the e-mail system is working properly, or can quickly perform troubleshooting actions in case any problems are triggered.

Web site monitoring is another important aspect that companies who provide services through web sites are quite interested in. in case you want to confirm that your web site is online, all you need to do is to perform a simple procedure consisting of sending an HTTP request to the server and then watch the result. If you get a message saying something reasonably logical, you don't need to worry about anything as everything works fine. All this may be easily automated by the web site monitoring services available on the market. There a lot more things to add here, of course, that need to be taken into account while monitoring, such as geographically redundant testing servers, comparison of strings, of downloaded pages and many others.

On the other hand, if talking about e-mail monitoring the situation is slightly different as the same steps do not entirely apply. Take into consideration that telneting into an e-mail server in a specified port is quite easy and still very similar with the procedure used for monitoring the web sites, thus giving the individual the possibility to quickly realize that the server is online. The big difference between e-mail and web site monitoring is that the electronic mail service is more complex and there are a lot more problems that can occur between the point a message reaches a server and the point it is delivered. The problems that usually occur include server misconfiguration, wrong messages spooling, wrong permissions settings for various mailboxes, message malformation and so on and so forth. As a result, the fact that one knows that the sever is ready to receive e-mails does not tell you too much about whether you will eventually see what arrives into your local inbox or web e-mail interface.

The majority of e-mail monitoring services provide outsourced monitoring administration and content assessment services for the corporations that decide to monitor their e-mail systems with an inside hired team. Providing companies on the market today struggle to develop thorough outsourced e-mail administration services, which allow the receiver to safely and cost-efficiently outsource the administration duties associated with e-mail and web site monitoring and other filtering technology.

These e-mail monitoring services offer companies the possibility to achieve e-mail compliance and corporate governance by providing the right people and processes in order to review, assess, and report upon all confirmed cases of e-mail abuse. The administration services that are offered are really making the e-mail monitoring process easier to implement, administrate, manage and cheaper to run.

The majority of such monitoring services offer their costumers customers the possibility to choose if they want to outsource the high-risk and resource-heavy administration function and allow their businesses to concentrate on other core office and system administration tasks or to do it themselves. Studies have shown that the usage of monitoring services provided by outsourced e-mail monitoring administrators, helps companies reduce their field costs by 40 to 80% per year as compared to managing the e-mail monitoring administration processes inside the company.