How to Configure Email Notifications

Forensic Email Collector can send you a notification email after each completed acquisition session. This can be helpful for keeping track of long-running acquisition sessions. Instead of frequently checking the computer where FEC is running, you can receive a notification automatically once the acquisition is complete.

In order to configure and turn on notification emails:

1. Open the Preferences page and click the Notification Emails... link.

2. Check the Send Notification Emails checkbox.

3. FEC has the option to send notification emails for acquisition sessions that take longer than a specified amount of time. This can be useful to prevent FEC from sending notification emails for short-running acquisition sessions. It is often not necessary to get a notification email if you are already sitting in front of the computer, watching the acquisition.

If you would like to activate this threshold, check the Only If The Acquisition Session Takes Longer Than... checkbox and specify a timeframe. The default value is 30 minutes.

4. Populate the Sender Address and Recipient Address fields as follows:

Sender Address: This will be the "From" field of the notification emails. You may want to set this to something along the lines of "projects@yourcompany.com" where "yourcompany.com" is the domain of your firm.

Recipient Address: This is the destination address where the notification emails will be sent. You may want to set this to your own email address, or to a distribution list consisting of email addresses that should be notified of FEC's progress.

5. Select if FEC should act as an SMTP server and send emails directly, or use a relay server. We recommend that you use a relay server because FEC will not be able to send emails if the SMTP port is blocked by a firewall. Additionally, FEC's notification emails may be flagged as "spam" unless the computer where FEC is running is a properly configured SMTP server.

Using a relay server helps work around the above issues and delegates the email submission to an outside SMTP server configured for relay. You can use an account from your email service of choice such as Mailgun or SendGrid. Some of these services offer free accounts with a monthly limit on outgoing emails.

6. If you are using a relay server, populate the server settings. Do not use credentials that you have for a target email account to send notification emails as this would cause changes to the target mailbox.

Below is an example setup for Mailgun:

7. Once the configuration is complete, you can send a test email by clicking the Send Test Email button. Remember to check your "Spam" folder in case the test email gets flagged as "spam".

8. Click OK to save your settings.