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Is there a service online that would warn me when a heartbeat e-mail is not received.

For example, if I have servers that make a backup every day and then sends an e-mail confirming its success. I wouldn't want to check this myself every day.

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If you are willing to write some Perl, I think this could be accomplished. See: oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/perl/news/perladmin_0700.html – Bart De Vos Apr 12 '11 at 22:39
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I'm not sure what your service is, but could you set it to only send on failure? That way you only would get an email that you would want to check? – Nixphoe Apr 13 '11 at 2:35
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I'm going to say this is a bad idea... Email is known to be very unreliable, are you sure you want to wake up a 2AM because a email didn't come through? – Jacob Apr 13 '11 at 2:58
I would consider a tool to centrally poll for success/failure of backups rather than rely on if(email != arrive) { status = problem; } Such a tool would have alerting capability. – rthomson Apr 13 '11 at 4:41
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AlertFox (even the free plan) can do this if your email can be accessed via the web (gmail etc): Create a so called "macro" that logs in your web email account and checks if this specific email this in the inbox. And if found, have the macro archive it. Set the test interval to once a day.

=> This transaction test macro will fail (= send you an alert) if the email is not there on certain day.

Roughly like this:

  URL GOTO=https://www.gmail.com
  TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:* ATTR=ID:Email CONTENT=<<Input email>>
  TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:PASSWORD FORM=ACTION:* ATTR=ID:Passwd CONTENT=<<Input password>> 
  TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ACTION:* ATTR=NAME:signIn
  TAG POS=1 TYPE=* ATTR=TXT:"Email subject here"

Note that this macro will also fail for other reason, e. g. if Gmail is down. So a more direct solution is certainly better (as others have mentioned). But better this then nothing ;)

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