How many messages are my users sending?

Anthony Holmes  14 August 2008 11:38:23 PM

From time to time my customers tell me they want to know how many messages their users are sending. Domino statistics can tell you this if you know what you are looking for. Usually it turns out that your infrastructure is processing an impressively large number of emails.

Of course, a better way to get information about your email workload is to use Message Tracking: but I'm assuming you haven't got Message Tracking enabled. So these statistics are what you use when your CIO asks how many messages you process and you need to give a quick answer.
 
If you issue the command Show Stat Mail you get something like 146 different mail statistics. This overwhelming number is typical of Domino Statistics: complete overkill and rather confusing.

Three of them are relevant:

Mail.Delivered
Mail.Transferred
Mail.TotalRouted

Imagine that a user sends a single mail message to four people: with two recipeints on their home server and two on another server. Domino routes it like this:

How the Statistics work	Server One	Server Two
Mail.Delivered	2 (delivery to the two recipients with mail files on Server One)	2 (delivery to the two recipients with mail files on Server Two)
Mail.Transferred	1 (a single message was dispatched on this server)	0 (no message was dispatched from this server)
Mail.TotalRouted	4 (the message dispatched on this server is to be delivered to four people)	2 (a message arrived on this server that was addressed and delivered to two people)

If you gathered stats from Server One and Server Two, you'd overestimate the number of deliveries if you used Mail.TotalRouted: (4+2=6) because some messages are double counted. Instead, Mail.Delivered probably gives you the total you want (2+2=4)

Groups and other Domains (including the Internet)

If Domino knows about a group, then the statistics reflect the number of people in the group. If the group is in another domain then it is treated as one message for the Mail.Transferred and Mail.TotalRouted statistics. As far as your infrastructure is concerned, that's probably ok, because you'll only have processed a single message.

If your servers are sending directly to the other Domain (or to the internet, without going through a gateway) then you won't get a count for these messages in your Mail.Delivered figures (because they haven't been Delivered on any of your servers. If your servers send to a Domino gateway server, you will count those messages (both inwards and outwards) with the Mail.TotalRouted statistic on the gateway.

Statistic Start Time

These statistics are the totals since the server was last started. So be sure to divide the statistic by the number of days/hours/minutes since the server was restarted to get the number of messages per day/hour/minute.

In Summary

To a reasonably accurate total for the number of messages being sent per hour in your environment, calculate as follows:

(Server One Mail.Delivered/number of hours server has been running + Server Two Mail.Delivered/number of hours server has been running + etc...) PLUS (SMTP Gateway Server Mail.TotalRouted/number of hours server has been running).

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