Before fully cutting over your inbound mail flow to Proofpoint, it is recommended to run an inbound test to ensure that your mail server is ready to accept messages through Proofpoint. This can be done using one of two methods:
Method 1: Send a Test Email
This method requires that you have access to an email account that is already relaying through Proofpoint on the same regional stack (US or EU) as the client being set up, which makes it a more suitable approach for partners.
- Send a test email from another external email address on Proofpoint to an active mailbox on the new Proofpoint client's domain.
- In the new client's Proofpoint account, click Log Search on the top-left corner and run an inbound search for "any" mail.
- A successful test should show that the test email appears in the Proofpoint logs and was delivered.
- The very first email that relays through Proofpoint may show in the logs as "queued" if you have just sent the test email. Wait about 30 seconds and then run the log search again if this happens.
- Verify on the client's end that they did receive the test email.
Method 2: Telnet Test
If you are setting Proofpoint up for your own domain and are not being assisted by our support team, you may verify mail flow yourself using Telnet. These steps also assume that you are using a Windows PC.
- Launch a command prompt window (cmd) by either:
- Searching cmd after pressing the Windows key, or
- Pressing Windows key + R, then entering cmd into the drop-down
- In the command prompt, enter one of the following commands depending on your region:
- US customers: telnet mx1-us1.ppe-hosted.com 25
- EU customers: telnet mx1-eu1.ppe-hosted.com 25
- If successful, the system should return the message "Welcome to PPE Hosted SMTP Server"
- Type in each of the following commands one at a time, pressing Enter after each one. You should receive a return response starting with 250 or 354 after entering each command.
- helo x
- mail from: <emailaddressnotusingproofpoint@example.com>
- rcpt to: <user@yourdomain.com>
- data
- subject: test
- text that you would like to include in the test email
- .
- The message "queued as 7070E40006C" indicates that Proofpoint is now processing this test message.
Once this is complete, you may check the Proofpoint logs and the user's inbox to see if this has come through successfully:
- In the new client's Proofpoint account, click Log Search on the top-left corner and run an inbound search for "any" mail.
- A successful test should show that the test email appears in the Proofpoint logs and was delivered.
- The very first email that relays through Proofpoint may show in the logs as "queued" if you have just sent the test email. Wait about 30 seconds and then run the log search again if this happens.
- Verify on the client's end that they did receive the test email.
