Community Knowledge Base

SMTP Out Sessions

This report tells you the number of connections plus the different types of issues reported from SMTP outgoing mail for all domains on the server. Administrators may use this report to identify high usage domains, or individual accounts that have seen particular types of issues. This information can be used to evaluate whether to move such domains to another server or to set limits on domains or individual accounts. This report can also be used to find potentially compromised accounts because the administrator would see a jump in outgoing SMTP connections over time, and possible a jump in errors.

An administrator can change the dates of the report as well as the "Step", which means whether you want to see the report by hour (when viewing a domain's detail), day, week, month or quarter. (Based on the start and end dates -- so a quarterly report would need a full 3 months selected.) Domain Admins can change the chart type by clicking the chart icon next to the date, or even export the report as needed. Each column in the report is sortable, either ascending or descending, and the sort can change simply by clicking the column header.

System Admins can also switch the report from a "Trend" report, which shows the data for the server as a whole, or display information by Domain. This is called the report's "Mode". Changing the mode to display information by domain also allows a system admin to dig into that specific domain, by clicking on its name, to view the report just as a domain admin would view the report. This means the system admin can delve into individual user data simply by changing the Mode, again, to view the report by User.

The following report items are available:

  • Day - The day of the week covered by the report.
  • New Connections - The total number of overall outgoing connections from the mail server on that day.
  • Blocked Connections - The number of outgoing connections blocked due to IDS rules, SMTP blacklist, blocked senders, etc.
  • Bad Commands - The total number of connections that had invalid SMTP commands, poor syntax, etc.
  • Terminations - The total number of permanent errors for outgoing messages due to spam weight, too many recipients, bad commands, etc.
  • Bandwidth - The total amount of bandwidth used for all connections.

It's also possible to export this data in CSV format for use in other applications, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, etc. To do this, simply click the page icon in the upper right hand corner of the reports page. Once clicked, you'll be able to save the data and name the file to whatever you want.