MailWatch vs. MRTG

[Gerry Doris]

> Hi Steve,
>
> Here's my opinion - I use both, and I'm the author of MailWatch - IMHO
> they
> were both designed with different goals in mind and it depends on what
> your
> requirements are
>
> MailScanner-MRTG is brilliant for monitoring your mail server and getting
> the top-level statistics from it - also, it is lightweight on the server
> itself, and dead easy to install and requires little or no changes to
> MailScanner itself to operate.
>
> I designed MailWatch with a specific goal in mind - we used to use a
> commercial content scanner here and it *sucked* (even though it was
> expensive), but it did have a reasonable UI for a helpdesk to use but the
> reporting also sucked.  I wanted something that would allow me to see
> message level info (to, from, subject, size, sascore, status etc.) of
> recent
> messages processed by MailScanner(s) and to generate management reports
> from
> this information and to allow the Helpdesk to release quarantined messages
> and respond to mail queries amongst other things.
>
> MailWatch is NOT easy to install, however I've attempted to make it a bit
> easier in 0.3beta.  It does require minimal changes to MailScanner, and it
> will also introduce extra load on the server, although this is fairly
> minimal and even less so in 0.3beta.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Kind regards,
> Steve.

I installed MailWatch the other night.  The install instructions were
clear and I didn't find the process overly difficult.  There is more
involved than installing mailscanner-mrtg but should be easy for anyone
who can read.

Mailscanner-mrtg provides 15 graphs covering the last 24 hours and are
updated every 5 minutes.  Each of these graphs can be clicked on to open
similar graphs for the last week, month and year.  The graphs show the

- # of emails received
- MB of emails received
- # of spam messages
- # of virus messages
- # of copies of mailscanner running
- # of copies of sendmail running
- amount of memory used
- cpu load average
- cpu utilization
- ethernet traffic
- space in /var/spool
- space in /
- space in /dev/shm (ram disk)
- # files in incoming queue
- # files in out going queue

I find these graphs to be great for a casual look to make sure everything
is running correctly.  For example, after playing with the server last
night I checked the graphs and noticed that there were two more instances
of sendmail running than there should be.  I'm not sure how I caused this
but it was easly fixed once I noticed.

The MailWatch application provides a wealth of detailed information
(including graphs of much of the data) on what your server is doing.  You
can see details of each individual message (sender, receiver, headers,
spam count, size, date, and time).  Spam messages are highlighted in pink
and virus messages in red.  All of this data is kept in a mysql database
and a multitude of reports are available to sort and graph the data in
various ways.  It's easy to see who receives the most mail by either
volume or size.  Which domains send you the most mail (# of messages or
size).  What are the spamassassin rule hits on your mail.  etc...

Both of these packages are very well done but intended for different uses.
 If I was given a new email server to administer I'd immediately want to
install these packages. There's been a lot of work put into them and it
shows!

Gerry