How do you count e-mail?

[Glenn Steen]

On 18/03/2008, Alessandro Dentella <sandro at e-den.it> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   yesterday some of you helped me out tuning a server. I always considered
>   it a 50-70.000 e-mail/day server (6000 domains), and for this reason, I
>   didn't set up a rbldnsd (they suggest to only set it up when you go over
>   250.00 mail/day.)
>
>   Today I tried pflogsumm and found completely different nubers:
>
>   48052   received
>   36004   delivered
>       0   forwarded
>     939   deferred  (6049  deferrals)
>    1288   bounced
>    1046k  rejected (96%)
>       0   reject warnings
>   96125   held
>       0   discarded (0%)
>
Pflogsumm is a bit confusing when used with MailScanner, since we HOLD
everything we accept, sort of.
The fun thing is that there is no realway to add the rejects (since
that could be one message tried over and over again) with what you
accept/deliver... And how do you count the multi-recipient mails? As
one message or (if for example you do per-recipient splitting, to make
sure the MailScanenr rulesets work correctly for all recipients, not
just the first one) as one/recipient? Where should one count them?
There is no one truth in this. Just a half-measure or two that, of
course, fit your purposes best:-).

I'd likely inform the one reported to (PHB or customer) of the
different types of figures one has, then blithely equate them...:-).
So in your case I'd add in the figures as seen by
MailScanner/MailWatch (if you use that) and the figures for the
rejects...
So your "ratio" would be the comparision (more or less) between ~1.1
million message "attempts" and the actual delivered messages.
Paints a pretty picture;-).

Just out of curiosity... what are the top rejections?

>    That's mode that 1 million messages received in a day and 96% rejected!
>    In the 48.00 received there is a 43% spam recognized and some more 5%
>    that I should menage to cut.
>
>    So some simple questions:
>
>    1. how do you consider the volume of a server: reading the rejected or
>       the received?
See above:-)

>    2. which is the average % spam that is 'fisiological' to accept in a fine
>       tuned server?

Sorry, don't really know what you mean with "fisiological"...
"healthy"? Your figures look fine, provided you have a failly low FP
rate... Trouble is evaluating exactly what that is:-).

>
>   for the curious ones. Yesterday was a nightmare with up to 12.000 messages in
>   the queue. Today no more than 200. I moved rbl at the postfix level and I
>   reduced to just 3 rbl. I had to raise the postfix process to 500 (350/400
>   used). Previously I tried putting rbl in postfix but since I didn't raise the
>   postfix processes I had too many rejected connections.

Ah. Good for you!

Cheers
-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se