definition: messages per month?

[David While]

Just to add Vispan counts envelopes processed - it doesn't care about
how many recipients there were for each email. As Martin points out it
is more important to know how much work MailScanner is doing for things
like hardware etc.

If there are 10,000 receipients in an email - MailScanner only scans it
once (unless you decide to split it at the MTA level).

Similarly looking at Vispan stats it is possible for the individual
virus counts to differ from the messages containing viruses since one
email can contain multiple viruses.

--------------------------------------------
David While BSc CEng MBCS CITP
Technical Development Manager
School of Computing & Information
University of Central England
Tel: 0121 331 6211
-------------------------------------------- 

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Martin Hepworth
Sent: 10 September 2004 09:32
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: definition: messages per month?

Eric

I always use the 'envelopes' per month version myself...ie how many
actual messages (qf,df pairs - or whatever your MTA uses to store
messages in the queue) are processed.

Otherwise the stats go up the wall - hey my MS processed 2 billion
messages last month, when actually it only  processed two MTA queue file
message pairs!!!

I'm not concerned that a message had multiple recipients, I'm concerned
about the actual number of messages, which has a direct correlation to
the performance and size of the hardware required.

--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300


Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:49:06PM -0700, Fractal IT Dept. wrote:
>
>>Michele Neylon : Blacknight Solutions wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I'd go by whatever the SQL logging says :)
>>>
>>>
>>
>>That's what I was going by, using Mailwatch. But that doesn't seem to
>>take into account the extra recipients when there are multiples.
>
>
> I've been meaning to ask about the semantics of this myself for
> sometime. Since I'm about to run some stats for August (yes, I'm a
> little behind ... I was out sick most of last week) now's as a good a
> time as any.
>
> In addition to whether to count mails received or mails delivered,
I've
> wondered how others come up with percentages of viruses, spams and
other
> nasties caught. Obviously, I know how many were caught. But, I have to
> rely soley on user reports of false-positives and false-negatives for
> percentages missed. I know most of our users don't give us reports, so
> how can I even estimate these percentages? How do the various stats
> scripts and packages come up with numbers like these?
>
> And then, if something gets blocked or deleted, do you count how many
> people would have gotten it? or does each blocked mail count only once
> since it wasn't split out for delivery?
>
> I get all confused trying to keep this straight for myself. It's even
> worse trying to explain it to management.
>
> -Eric Rz.
>
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