Three types of usage reports are available in surgemail, each provides slightly different information:
The Monthly usage reports are an efficient way of providing usage statistics on a per account, per domain or per server basis. This will typically be used for accounting purposes or for routine monitoring of the behaviour of users of the system.
A variety of statistics are recorded on a per account basis as each message is processed. These statistics can be broadly classified as relating to mail sent and received, and to mail retrieved via POP and IMAP. For local accounts both these sets of information are recorded. If surgemail is running in a surgewall configuration or has gateway rules defined, statistics are also gathered on the "gateway" accounts. These are obviously not real accounts on the system and this usage information is based on mail delivered to unique gateway email addresses in this case.
Account usage (all domains) - matched 5 records today account msg Rcv mb Rcv msg Sent mb sent -- p/i sess mb_read -- ~~~~~~~ wrapped joebloggs@mydomain2.com 3 0.0 7 0.0 -- 1 0.0 -- below marijn@mydomain.com 8 0.0 4 1.6 -- 10 0.0 -- ~~~~~~~ user1@mydomain.com 4 1.6 0 0.0 -- 1 0.0 -- user1@mydomain2.com 4 0.4 0 0.0 -- 0 0.0 -- user2@mydomain2.com 14 1.4 0 0.0 -- 0 0.0 -- Total 33 3.4 11 1.6 -- 12 0.0 -- ~~~~~~~ last connected lastip cpu_sec elap_sec mb quota -- virus blk -- msgsleft mb_left 12-Oct-2004 12:25:30 127.0.0.1 0 54 0.0 -- 0 -- 3 0.0 12-Oct-2004 12:20:09 127.0.0.1 0 14 0.0 -- 0 -- 0 0.0 12-Oct-2004 12:24:34 127.0.0.1 0 22 1.6 -- 0 -- 4 1.6 never 0 0 0.4 -- 0 -- 0 0.0 never 0 0 1.4 -- 0 -- 0 0.0 never 0 90 3.4 -- 0 -- 7 1.6 ~~~~~~~
The above report contains the following information:
Domain usage reports provide a summary per domain with a total of all domains at the bottom. Account usage reports list each account individually with a total of all entries at the bottom. In addition the reports can be sorted on any column and limited to the top N accounts. In advanced mode wildcard exclude and limit filters can be applied similar to the main log file searching.
These reports are available to domain administrators and to server administrators using the Reports link in the web admin interface. In addition these reports are available on the command line using the following command: tellmail report report_type [output file] [days=n sort_type=user ...]
eg. Top 20 senders of mail over the last 5 days:
tellmail report account_usage c:\output.txt days=5 top=20 sort_type=bytesent
Valid values to pass each of the
options of this tellmail command can be found by checking the na_reports.htm
template file. You can pass the tellmail report command the following optional
parameters: domain, days, sort_type, top, exclude, limit.
In addtion you can pass a date range over which to generate the report. To
do so use "range=DDMMYYYY-DDMMYYYY" instead of "days=n".
The data for these reports is stored in daily usage snapshots (recYYMM/statYYMMDD.dat) with a monthly summary (recYYMM/summary.dat). When generating these reports it is most efficient to generate a report for "previous calendar month" as the monthly summary just gets loaded and appropriately filtered and displayed. In any of the n days to-date reports, each of the daily summary files gets totaled before the report gets generated. These statistics snapshot files are stored in binary format but can be dumped as text format using the command: tellmail pstat_dump filename
There are several other aspects one should be aware of as to the detailed operation of the mail sent and received logging:
- Under default installed operation "mail sent" is attributed to the account logged in using SMTP authentication. If the message is sent without SMTP authentication then the mail from address is used to determine the account sending mail. This can obviously be faked. The setting g_acctlog_authonly allows you to only record messages sent from a particular account if smtp authentication is used.
- For surgewalled accounts / gatewayed accounts the delivery of a message to a unique gatewayed email address will start the recording of mail sent and received on a particular account.
- When a message is redirected either from a particular account (eg user.cgi level forwarding or using aliases or redirection rules) this is attributed to a particular accounts as having "sent this message". This allows for the easy identification of accounts that have high volume redirections to non local addresses. This logging can be disabled using g_acctlog_noaliases.
- If you have a large number of inactive accounts in your userdatabase the recording of deliveries to these accounts can make the record files grow excessively large. If g_acctlog_sum_inactive is set, any mail delivered to an account that has never logged in yet is attributed to the not_logged_in_yet@yourdomain.com.
In addition to normal accounts usage information is also logged for the following special case accounts. Aliases as noted above, mailing lists and robots including the isspam address. eg:
Account usage (all domains) - matched 5 records today account MSG Rcv Mb Rcv MSG Sent Mb Sent -- ... alias@mydomain.com 0 0.0 11 0.0 -- ...
isspam@mydomain.com 0 0.0 12 0.0 -- ...
testlist_marijn-bounce@mydomain.com 0 0.0 4 0.0 -- ...
testlist_marijn@mydomain.com 1 0.0 0 0.0 -- ...
|c:\surgemail\some_robot.exe 4 0.0 0 0.0 -- ...
|isspam 70 0.5 0 0.0 -- ...
Total 75 0.5 27 0.1 -- ...
The current status reports are generated based on actual users currently in the authentication database. If you have a slow authentication database and a large number of users the generation of this report can be rather slow.
Currently only a disk quota status report is available.
As for the monthly usage reports this report may be sorted on any column and limited to the top n entries or limited via the filters in advanced mode. Also this report is available to domain administrators.
Also as for the monthly reports this report can be generated on the command line using : tellmail report quota c:\output.txt top=20 sort=quota_pct
Account name % used bytes used byte limit user2@mydomain.com 34% 6.9mb 20.0mb user1@mydomain.com 7% 1.5mb 20.0mb marijn@mydomain.com 0% 8.0kb 20.0mb user1@mydomain2.com 0% 392kb unlimited joebloggs@mydomain2.com 0% 2.6kb unlimited user2@mydomain2.com 0% 1.3mb unlimited Total NA 10.2mb unlimited
This report screen lets you analyse a section of the delivery logs on the fly to trouble shoot a particular "high use" problem.
The report can be sorted by the number of messages:
You can also specify the time period, and number of lines of the report to display. For Example:
Size Stored Rejected Spam Sent Received Failed InQue To 23k 0 1 0 0 2 0 1 chrisp@netwin.co.nz 4k 3 0 0 0 3 0 0 test3@lap 3k 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 spam2@netwin.co.nz
The complete delivery logs are processed each time for the generation of this report. If the log files are large then this is likely to be a rather disk io intensive process. For a typical system of 50K active users the delivery logs could easily be 250mb per day.