With Email Notifications being by far the most popular and widely used type of notification in ELM it may seem difficult at times to improve on such a tried and true performer. Yet once again our power users out there together TNT Software’s Support Engineers have uncovered another simple yet powerful customization feature to help manage the email notifications you receive from ELM.
More than likely you are well aware of the variables that can be inserted into both the subject line and / or body of an email message, as highlighted below.
These variables help to quickly pinpoint the details that matter most in the notifications you receive. But wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to sort, group, and filter messages quickly and cleanly AFTER they hit your inbox? Well, you can.
On the very first tab of every email notification you have the ability to identify the From field for a mail message. Many SMTP hosts reject e-mail from unknown hosts or addresses with invalid formatting. Quite often a generic “elm@companyname.com” email address is used here so that the notification emails don’t get rejected and you can easily identify the sender. That may be enough for some, but wouldn’t it be great if you could have the email notification format the message so that it looks like it is coming from the server where the event was generated?
To accomplish this simple but effective task we’ll use a variable in the From field already mentioned. Using %computer%@companyname.com as seen below will format the email notification so that it appears to be coming from the server where the event was generated.
A word of caution; the From field does not like spaces. A dash (-) or underscore (_) works, but a colon (:) will fail.
Messages arriving in your inbox can now be sorted by the From field as well as Subject for easy sorting, grouping and organizing.
It doesn’t have to be just a computername variable used here. You could specify any of the variables available as well as your own custom input in the From field as you can see we did in the sample above with computer names, usernames, even Event View names. Just don’t get so creative that you trigger a spam filter!
We hope that you found this article on getting emails from the systems you are monitoring informative and useful and wish you continued success with ELM.