Troubleshooting Email With Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Email is a widely used and very effective communication tool. For businesses that rely on email, any email connectivity issues can be very troublesome as they are then unable to communicate with their customers and/or suppliers. And for IT Administrators, it could be a tough task to pinpoint the cause of the problem remotely. Sometimes, customers who are facing connectivity issues are unable to provide sufficient information to the IT administrators so that they may able to investigate the problem. And that’s where Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer (MRCA) comes in.

MRCA is a web-based tool that provides a number of features for IT Administrators to help troubleshoot connectivity issues that occur between email clients and servers. The tool simulates several client logon and mail flow scenarios to test all scenarios. And when a test fails, the tool presents the errors it discovered which can assist the IT administrators to trace and correct the problem. Because of its simplicity, clients or customers can run the tests themselves and send the results to their IT Administrator for further investigation.

The simplicity of the tool enables anyone to test their email client or server. Here are the 5 easy steps to perform a test on an email address.

• Go to https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/
• Select the Inbound SMTP Email option and click next.
• Enter the email address which is facing connectivity issues.
• Key in the Captcha code to verify the session.
• After the verification is complete, click Perform Test.

Here is a sample of the result once the test is completed. The tool also allows the user to save the result in XML or HTML format.