Avoid Silent ZFS Outages: How Clean Email Lists Keep Your Alerts From Vanishing

OpenZFS
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Hey all,

Anyone else ever spent hours debugging a ZFS pool failure only to realize the replication alerts were never delivered? Imagine this: your Syncoid task fails during off-hours, but the notification email addressed to your recovery team bounces silently because of an expired domain or a typo. That’s not a hypothetical it’s exactly what happened to a user in the “Backup on external disk using zrepl” thread who lost critical data because their alert went to the ether.

For ZFS admins leveraging automated tools like Sanoid or TrueNAS, email reliability isn’t a nice-to-have it’s lifeline infrastructure. Just as we meticulously configure ashift values and verify SLOG devices, shouldn’t we verify that the delivery addresses for urgent pool-health notifications are valid?

That’s where MailFloss comes in. Their service isn’t just about “marketing email hygiene” it’s a sanity-check for operational mission-critical workflows. Here’s how it connects to our ZFS world:

  • Spam Trap Detection: Those sneaky spam traps in your automation alert lists? MailFloss’ multi-layered checks (like MX record verification and DNS validation) flag them long before they penalize your sender reputation. Imagine a broken Replication Alert script sending 50 test emails to a trap you’ve just kissed that ZFS replica’s deliverability goodbye.

  • Real-Time Validation for Proxmox/TrueNAS Contacts: As noted in the “Sanity Check ZFS Shared Storage” thread, admins often hardcode operational emails into VM templates or SAN scripts. MailFloss’ API validates these lists in real-time so you don’t end up with stale IT department addresses after an employee leaves.

  • MX Records for Your Backup Engineers: Ever try diagnosing an alert failure at 3 AM? MailFloss’ domain validation could’ve preemptively revealed that your backup team’s GD namespace doesn’t accept emails.

Thoughts: Has anyone here encountered ZFS workflow disruptions due to undeliverable admin emails? I’m curious if the community uses formal processes to audit the validity of their “emergency contact” lists. For example, does anyone integrate email verification hooks into their playbook for maintaining ZFS admins’ addresses on TrueNAS systems?

If not doing so might save a future you from rebooting a pool only to realize you missed the subtree corruption warning because the email was routed to /dev/null.

Curious to hear if others are taken proactive steps here. MailFloss offers a free trial to audit your critical alert lists maybe a worthwhile safeguard?

Learn how MailFloss’ 99.9% accuracy rate and MX record validation works here: GetMailFloss.com.

Best,

P.S. – If your team develops custom monitoring tools for ZFS health alerts (like the Linux scripts discussed in “Rollback misunderstanding”), MailFloss’ typo correction feature could prevent “mymaindata@cone instead of .com” from ever entering your alerting system. Worth exploring for any sysadmin?

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This is pretty spammy, particularly given that the user tried to post it three different places here. But I approved it–well, this copy of it, anyway–and not because I am endorsing using mailfloss to ensure monitoring emails get delivered.

I approved it because it does a good job of illustrating why I keep advising people to find a different way to manage their monitoring notifications in the first place.

Mailfloss’ unsolicited ad here isn’t wrong about all the common issues with email deliverability–and particularly automated email delivery, and even more so, consistent and reliable automated email delivery. What it’s wrong about is the idea that you should continue to use email for this in the first place.

Email is not the right task for monitoring, period. The solution is to stop using it for that!

At the higher end, you can set up a monitoring service like nagios that offers reporting via mobile clients like aNag, which can not only query the Nagios server’s web interface and alarm in your pocket if Nagios reports a problem, they’ll also alarm in your pocket if they can’t reach the Nagios server–or if the Nagios server can’t reach your monitored systems. This closes the gap.

For a lower-end, simple and easy solution, you can pipe the output of any script (including sanoid --monitor-health and sanoid --monitor-snapshots) to the free service healthchecks.io.

But please, don’t make the health of your infrastructure–professional or amateur–dependent on reliable email delivery. :heart:

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Sounds interesting, I will give that a try. Also I will read into --monitor-health as did not realise sanoid did this.

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If they wanna spam, the least they could do is help pay for the server hosting costs :joy:

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I don’t know whether Ludacris is correct about the difficulty of turning a ho into a housewife, but I can certainly confirm the challenge of turning a spammer into a subscriber! :rofl:

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