>From time to time I get asked some variant of "how many emails do the University systems reject?" (meaning at the MXs).
My problem is that I never really know how to answer that accurately and meaningfully. I run eximstats over the consolidated logs from the MXs, which gives me a report. I get a count of connections made, and some of those will get through and cause emails to be delivered, and others will be rejected, at HELO time or RCPT time or DATA time as seems appropriate for efficiency or best information purposes (The report gives a breakdown of the reasons for rejections through the use of custom patterns looking for strings set with log_message per acl clause). Some connections may just be shed off through the use of imposed SMTP delays and I never get any more information than the remote IP. The problem is, of course, that a connection could deliver one or more email messages, and one email message may be addressed to one or more recipients. This makes a direct comparison of connections vs deliveries difficult. It's also hard to say whether a message for two recipients is one or two emails. The MTA transports it as one message, but on a traditional (Unix) email system a copy may get delivered to each recipient, so does it then become two messages? On the other hand, if delivery is to a modern 'database' message store, like Exchange, in some cases at least, I think I am right in saying there is just one 'copy' of the message in the database, and each user just receives a pointer to it from their inbox. In either case, I imagine each user would count the copy of the message in their own inbox as separate from the one in another recipients inbox - each 'copy' is viewed as a unique message. For the purposes of the report request, I usually end up giving the relevant numbers with units, and include a rider saying that direct comparisons of the numbers could be misleading with a brief explanation. I just wondered if anyone had any neat ways of summarising this, or resolving the issue of mismatched units (# connections vs # messages vs # recipients). Or just calculate a converstion factor for '# messages delivered from a connection' and multiply up, and not trouble whoever is asking with the detail. Or perhaps I'm missing something obvious. Jethro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jethro R Binks Computing Officer, IT Services University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
