Looking for software to monitor scheduled emails and notify when they don't arrive or contain errors

We, like many others I assume, get a lot of emails from systems running automated task (backups and such). Those emails should arrive on certain schedules and not contain error messages. If they don't arrive as planned or contain error messages, then obviously we have some work to do.

The problem is that with the volume of email that comes in, it can be easy to not realize an expected email did not arrive. It can also be tedious to look through a lot of email for error messages when most of the messages will not have errors.

So, it would be nice to have a system that could be configured to monitor a mail box and notify us if an expected email didn't arrive on time or had an error message in the email.

Does anyone know of an email monitoring program like this?

I don't know of anything like this, but it seems like it would be relatively easy to handroll a nagios monitor to check for email in a mailbox and make sure that the last one that matched the specified subject line had happened no longer than X minutes ago. So if you expect to get 1 email/hr, make sure that there's always an email in the mailbox with the matching subject that's less than an hour old. You can check as often as you like, of course since the check is time-independent.

It's a common complaint of SAs and the solution is simpler than you think. Just turn it on it's head.

Only send email when there is a problem.

As you've well discovered, there is a breaking point whereby sending the output of every system task far outweighs any human's ability to parse it all. Either you don't have time to sit down and read all of those reports. Or, if you are lucky enough to have the time, the vast quantity of positive data makes the process of identifying the negative data statistically improbable.

You can still store that information as log files on the systems themselves for future reference. But chances are that you don't need to read them every day or week. So do yourself a favour :)