About report output settings

The output settings determine how to distribute reports and alerts. To send reports and alerts, you must select how you want to operate with mail servers and email-to-SMS gateway systems. The Smoothwall Firewall generates SMS alerts by sending emails to a designated email-to-SMS gateway. When an email-to-SMS gateway receives an email, it extracts the information it needs and composes and sends an SMS message.

A wide variety of different email-to-SMS gateway services are available. However, each has its own definition of the format that an email should arrive in. While there are a few conventions, typically, the destination SMS number is placed in the email's subject line. You need to configure the Smoothwall Firewall so that it can format email messages in the format specified by your email-to-SMS gateway service provider.

Placeholder Tags

To configure message formats for different service providers, you can incorporate these placeholder tags into an email template.

Placeholder Tag Description
%%ALERT%% The content of the alert message.
%%SMS%% The recipient SMS number.
%%EMAIL%% The recipient's email address.
%%HOSTNAME%% The host name of the (useful when using multiple firewall systems).
%%DESCRIPTION%% The description of the (useful when using multiple firewall systems).
%%--%% A special placeholder that indicates that all text following it should be truncated to 160 characters. You must turn on truncation for this (indicated by the Truncate SMS messages to 160 characters option).

For example, if an email-to-SMS gateway needs emails to be sent to <telephone number>@sampleSMS.com, you would use this configuration:

  • %%SMS%%@sampleSMS.com

If the content of the message should be entered in the email message body, you would use this configuration:

  • %%ALERT%%

Customers who have networks with multiple Smoothwall Firewalls might want to include details of the system that the alert was generated by.

In this case, you would use this configuration:

Placeholder Tag Description
%%ALERT%% From: %%HOSTNAME%%
%%ALERT%% From: %%HOSTNAME%% (%%DESCRIPTION%%)
%%ALERT%% From: %%DESCRIPTION%%
%%ALERT%% %%HOSTNAME%%
%%ALERT%% %%DESCRIPTION%% (%%HOSTNAME%%)

Truncating messages

Some email-to-SMS gateways can't process messages whose content is longer than 160 characters. You can configure the Smoothwall Firewall to truncate messages. In this mode, all characters past position 155 are removed and the text, (.. +) is appended to the message to indicate that truncation has occurred.

A further complication is caused by email-to-SMS gateways that need parameters such as usernames and passwords to be set within the email's message body. In situations where truncation is turned on, such additional parameter text might force truncation of the actual alert. To compensate for this, insert the special (%%--%%) placeholder at the start of the actual message content, so that any truncation is only applied to the actual alert content.