How to interpret MailScanner stats

Carlyle Smith CSmith at intersoftcorp.com
Sun Dec 31 20:49:03 CET 2006


I am trying to put together reports for my clients to impress them with
how good a job our filtering system is working, but I don't understand
the statistics well enough to explain it to them.  For my domain for
December, I get the following totals:

 

   Mail                     33,878        Are these "ham"?

   Virus                    124

   Spam                   6,261

   MCP                    0.0  

   Volume                618.9 Mb

   Unknown Users    433,489

   Can't Resolve       66,282

   RBL                     1,624,822

 

Ultimately, the most basic stats of interest are:

 

   a) What is the total number of messages processed?

   b) How many were filtered out? (i.e. how much time/money did this
save them?)

 

I can't figure out how I should add the totals above together to get
this information.  My guess would be:

 

   Filtered out = Virus + Spam + MCP + UnknownUsers + Can'tResolve + RBL
= 2,130,978

   Messages getting through = "Mail" = 33,878

   Total processed = "Filtered Out" + " Messages getting though" =
2,164,856

 

However, this would indicate 98% of the messages are getting blocked...
This seems a bit extreme, so I think I'm missing something here.

 

Can someone enlighten me on how this works?

 

Thanks,

Carlyle

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/attachments/20061231/1ca93e85/attachment.html


More information about the MailScanner mailing list