Just like many other sys admins, we get a considerable amount of email each day that are basically just status updates from automated processes. Most of these emails report "ok" conditions and need no further attention. Every once in a while, an email indicates an error condition that needs attention.

We would like to setup an email monitoring solution that would be responsible for expecting these status emails and looking for error conditions. If an email was not received when expected or the email contained an error message (configurable), then we would be notified by email/pager/phone etc.

Someone told me Big Brother would handle this, but I would prefer to stay free/open source. I have looked briefly at Mon and Ngios, which are good networking monitoring solutions, but they didn't seem designed to monitor email the way I envision.

Does anyone know of programs that are out there that do what I describe above?

Thanks.

procmail can do filtering

Thanks for the response. Procmail would probably do, but I was hoping to find something that was built for the purpose of monitoring email according to my original post. With something like procmail, or my own Python script, I am going to have to do a lot of customization to get phone/pager alerts.