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 your specific domain. Domain administrators may use this report to identify high usage accounts, or accounts that have seen particular types of issues. This information can be used to evaluate whether to move such accounts to another server or to set limits on such 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.

A domain administrator can change the dates of the report as well as the "Step", which means whether you want to see the report by hour, 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.

Domain admins can also switch the report from a "Trend" report, which shows the data for the domain as a whole, to display information by User. This is called the report's "Mode".

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.