Every report email is read by a rule you can check.
A parsing rule turns a report email into a result: OK, warning or failed. Built-in rules cover the common backup products, a generic rule catches the rest, and anything that still does not fit waits in the Inbox instead of disappearing.
Which products are read without any setup.
Every built-in rule reads the result: OK, warning or failed. Some also read the job name, the size or how long the backup took.
Cove Data Protection’s “completed with errors” reads as a warning. A Synology integrity check never counts as a backup run; a failed check opens its own alert.
| Product | Also reads |
|---|---|
| Veeam Backup & Replication | Job name, size, duration |
| Acronis Cyber Protect | Result only |
| Synology Hyper Backup / Active Backup | Task name, duration |
| Synology Hyper Backup integrity check | Checked task name |
| Datto | Result only |
| Proxmox VE / PBS (vzdump) | Size, duration |
| NAKIVO | Result only |
| MSP360 (CloudBerry) | Result only |
| Cove Data Protection | Result only |
| Duplicati | Job name, duration |
| Microsoft 365 backup | Result only |
When one address can carry several backups.
Each client gets its own address to send reports to. Whether one address is enough depends on whether the rule can tell the backups apart by name.
- Veeam, Synology, Duplicati
- The rule reads the job or task name, so every job of that client can report to the client address and each lands on its own backup.
- Other products
- One backup per address. Use the client address for one backup, and a per-job address for each of the others.
- Client address
- Looks like harbour-it-northwind-dental-3f9a1c2b7d4e8f60@ingest.backupsentinel.io.
- Per-job address
- A random address for one backup, shown on that backup in the app. BackupSentinel creates it; it cannot be edited.
How a rule is chosen, and what happens when none fits.
- Your workspace’s own rules are tried before the library’s.
- Rules with a subject filter are tried before catch-all rules.
- The first rule that matches reads the email.
- It looks for failure words first, then warning words, then OK words, in the subject before the body.
Only when no rule matches does the generic rule read the email, with a fixed set of words:
| Result | Words |
|---|---|
| Failed | failed, failure, error |
| Warning | warning, warn |
| OK | success, completed successfully |
A rule that matches but finds none of its words gives No result read. The email goes to the Inbox, not to the backup.
A rule of your own for anything else that sends email.
On the Email parsing page, a custom rule says which emails it reads and which words mean what. Before you save, Test against a sample email runs it on a pasted subject and body and shows the result it would give.
- Subject pattern
- A regular expression that picks the emails the rule reads
- Keywords
- One list each for OK, warning and failure
- Job-name pattern
- Reads the job name, so one address can carry several backups
- Size pattern
- Reads the size the backup wrote
Customize a built-in rule
The Template library lists the built-in and community rules. Customize makes an editable copy in your workspace, which then takes precedence over the original.
Share a rule
Submit a rule to the library and BackupSentinel reviews it before it appears there for other workspaces.
Patterns that stay fast
A pattern is at most 200 characters, and nested or adjacent repeats such as (a+)+ are refused when you save.
The Inbox keeps every email that did not land on a backup.
Every report email is listed with what happened to it. The Needs review tab holds the ones that need a person: Not assigned and No result read.
- Applied
- Read and recorded on its backup.
- Superseded
- Older than the backup’s last report: stored, but the status does not change.
- Not assigned
- No backup matched the email.
- No result read
- A rule matched but found no result in it.
- Ignored
- Set aside by someone on your team.
- Assign to a backup
- Records the email on a backup you already watch.
- Start monitoring
- Creates the backup from the email, within your plan’s job limit, and assigns the email to it.
- Ignore
- One email, or up to 500 at a time.
- Restore
- Brings an ignored email back.
What it does not do.
- Of the built-in rules, only Veeam, Synology and Duplicati read a job name. For the other products, each backup needs its own address.
- A custom rule reads the result, the job name and the size. It has no field for how long the backup took.
- A rule you share appears in the library only after BackupSentinel has reviewed it.
- Each backup accepts up to 100 reports in 24 hours, and each client up to 200 unassigned emails a day.
Send one report and see how it is read.
Point a backup's report email at its client address. The first one shows up with its result, or in the Inbox with the reason it could not be read.