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Measures reported by MailTest
The MailTest monitors
the availability of the mail server from an external perspective. To
do this, the MailTest sends a test mail periodically from one user account
to another and measures whether the mail was sent successfully and what the
delivery time was. This test
uses SMTP protocol for sending, and uses POP3 or IMAP protocols for receiving
mails. The measures
made by this test are as
follows:
| Measurement |
Description |
Measurement
Unit |
Interpretation |
| Send_avail |
Indicates the
availability of the mail server to which the test attempts to connect
to send mail. |
Percent
|
A value of 0
indicates that the test was not successful in sending a mail. Possible
reasons for this could include the mail server being down, the network
connection to the server not being available, etc. |
| Receive_avail |
Indicates the
availability of the POP3/IMAP server to which the test attempts to
connect to receive mail messages. |
Percent
|
A value of 0
indicates that the test was not successful in receiving a mail message
from the POP3/IMAP server. Possible reasons for this could include the
POP3/IMAP server being down, the user login being invalid, a failure
of the authentication system that the POP3/IMAP server uses for
authenticating user requests, etc. |
| Outstanding_msgs |
Indicates the
number of messages that have been sent but have not been received. |
Number
|
A large value is
usually associated with a very high value of the Roundtrip_time
measurement. This is usually attributable to excessive load on the
SMTP mail server. Delivery delays may also happen if the server is not
able to send mail out (e.g., due to DNS failures, due to large number
of failed messages which are being retried often, etc.). |
| Roundtrip_time |
The average delay
between the transmission of one message and its reception by a user. |
Mins
|
This is a key
measure of the quality of the mail service. An increase in Roundtrip_time
may be indicative of a problem with the SMTP mail service. Possible
reasons could include spamming, queuing failures, disk space being
full, etc. |
| Note:
The accuracy of the Roundtrip_time measurement is dependent on
the frequency at which the MailTest is getting executed. For
example, assume that MailTest is executed once every 5
minutes. Since the MailTest only checks for message receptions every
time it executes, the Roundtrip_time may be reported as 5 mins even
if the message has actually been delivered to the user within a
minute of its transmission.
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