12 Jul 2015

Doing business by email

Would you lose business if prospects couldn’t reach you by email? When was the last time you checked where sales@your-company.com actually ends up, that somebody was reading the messages and responding to them? It’s not unknown for company inboxes like sales@ or info@ to fill up with spam, and start to return "mailbox full" to real enquiries. If the sales inbox is usually quiet but occasionally receives a big deal or enquiry "out of the blue", it’s particularly vulnerable to this type of outage.

Since you can tick a beat with just a click of the mouse, you can ensure business critical inboxes stay "alive" really easily. Arrange for a message containing a "tick link" to be sent in automatically every so often (say, once a week). Tickbeat won’t forget: it’ll be expecting those messages and your beat will miss if someone isn’t clicking the links.

This is better than fully-automated testing because you know that a person has clicked the link - and that means the email got to somebody’s eyeballs, at least. Confirmation of delivery isn’t the same as confirmation that your email’s reaching the right person. It’s better than notify-on-fail because notify-on-fail is reliant on the same system that’s under test (i.e. your email). If you’re worried about the reliability of the process sending the automatic emails, well, Tickbeat can’t help but it’ll certainly notice the absence of ticks.

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