Improving the stats in OpenSRS Email Service
By: James Koole on October 1st, 2008
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: Email Service
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The underlying philosophy behind the statistics functions inside the OpenSRS Email Service is to provide the most flexibility possible. Rather than providing a small subset of stats to all users inside the Mail Administration Center (MAC), it was thought that our users would be better served by providing a full, extensive stats package, allowing you to take that raw stats data and manipulate or analyze it in whatever ways you like.
You’re free to take all that data, downloaded as .csv files and then import it into your own databases or spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel can read these files, for instance) and mash it up in whatever way that you wish. If you want to know what percentage of users prefer webmail, it’s in there. If you want to spot trends in how often users are logging in to check for mail, it’s in there.
You can even have those stats sent to you daily so you can create a system to automatically update and track usage across your email customer/user base.
We think that the stats engine inside OpenSRS Email satisfies the requirements of a wide range of potential users and uses, from support staff who need an easy way to see a particular user’s account activity, to the executive at a large ISP who wants to know how customers are accessing email.
But as I said, we wanted to provide flexibility for all customers and while that type of stats collection and distribution might work well for some of our larger customers, we also realize that some of our customers will want an easy way to look at certain stats without having to do any complex data mining. So we built in some simple, automatic graphing features for some of the most widely used of the stats we collect.
Inside the MAC, depending on your admin level, you can view stats for things like total logins, broken down across the various login types (POP, IMAP and webmail). You can view a range of stats for your entire company, or for a single domain, and even for a single user. You can see visually if a user hasn’t accessed their email in a long time or if there was a sudden spike in outgoing mail from a specific account or domain indicating a possible abuse situation. You can monitor things like quota usage and get a better understanding of how your customers use the email service.
To better explain the stats features within the MAC, we put together a quick screencast that shows some of the functionality that’s available to you:
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