Alert email messages provide notification about activities or events logged. These email messages also provide notification about log severities that are recorded, such as a critical or emergency.

You can send alert email messages to up to three email addresses. Alert messages are also logged and can be viewed from the Event Log menu, in the System Event log file.

You can use the alert email feature to monitor logs for log messages, and to send email notification about a specific activity or event logged. For example, if you require notification about administrators logging in and out, you can configure an alert email that is sent whenever an administrator logs in and out. You can also base alert email messages on the severity levels of the logs. The FortiGate unit does not currently support SSL/TLS connections for SMTP servers, so you must choose an SMTP server that does not need SSL/TLS when configuring the SMTP server settings.

Before configuring alert email, you must configure at least one DNS server if you are configuring with an Fully Qualified Domain Server (FQDN). The FortiGate unit uses the SMTP server name to connect to the mail server, and must look up this name on your DNS server. You can also specify an IP address.