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Hi, Please guys I did send this to suggestions, but I need to make this an urgent request.

I got a nice shock yesterday when I got my billing for my bandwidth for my first smartermail servers traffic since converting from merak.. 30Gb traffic. You might say well that is a small amount of traffic, well unfortunately we pay prime for our traffic here in Southg Africa My shock, Smartermail only accounts for around 14Gb of traffic for the 120 odd domains I moved onto this server.

The problem. Smartermail only logs outbound smtp traffic to outside recipients for the users and inbound smtp traffic for the users. At no point does it log the pop and smtp traffic from the users themselves.

Therefore a 5mb email from a user sent out to a mail recipient is only reported as 5Mb however there is 5Mb of traffic in from the client and another 5Mb of traffic for delivery to the recipient which in reality is 10Mb of traffic. and vise versa a person sends a user a 5mb email its 5mb smtp session in and a 5mb pop collection = 10Mb of traffic.

The problem :  I thought I could do was just double up the traffic in HELM via a script and bill the client for it, but you cant because a client might send a 5mb email to 10 users, the total amount of traffic is then 1 x 5mb smtp   in and 10 x 5mb smtp out  = 55mb and not  5 x 10 x 2 = 100mb. So this theory of mine goes out the window. I need SM4 to put this info into the stat files and then helm can grab it and then helm will also reflect the right amounts.

PLEASE put an option in to log the pop and smtp sessions from the users as well and maybe put an option in to setup the bandwidth report to show the full traffic amounts or just the in and out smtp amounts, as it is now.

Customers who use smartermail on their private networks only has to worry about internet traffic and not local traffic on the lan, the current bandwidth settings reflect this traffic 100% but in the case of an ISP the bandwidth logs are only half of the truth, as can be seen by the difference in traffic 30Gb actual vs 14Gb reported. I know in the states, etc you guys get bandwidth dirt cheap, and normally dont even limit users, but here in good old RSA we pay BIG time for trafic.

Sad to say, but you would be the first one to do this. How do you expect to handle IMAP traffic? What about traffic from the website - I mean, the user may decide not to use POP3, but the webmail.

Have you considered alternatives?

Like - moving your servers out of south africa?

 Even at my worst hosting ever (price wise), 30gb of traffic would only have accounted for 5,70 euro - not even 10 dollars. And that WAS at a premium. If SA is so darm expensive, then I suggest you move your server out of country.

I can understand your sentiments..

Imap users we have basically none, so if I loose a lil bit on that side, well so be it, the webmail, I will have to look at and check out. 

but the reality of it is..

• If our websites and email are outside of SA when clients ADSL cuts off and goes to local only traffic then they have no mail or website.
• Local search engines only index local ip's
• We have endless problems with timeouts, response times from outside, her, we are awake when the rest of the dudes still sleeping . lol.
• Too many people have had their sites and email outside of SA and are busy moving back local again because of the problems.

Lovely country. Ka k internet infrustructure, we way behind u dudes out there, adsl lines only on 4mb, and then you pay for traffic as well ....

Your 5.7 euros for 30Gb is my R 337 euros converted, and that 30Gb is only the usage of a 100 odd domains I moved across to the SM server. What happens when I move my balance of my domains which constitutes another 250Gb + of traffic ?  That cost goes up to 2800 euros odd for my email bandwidth of which Im loosing half of that per month... 

Listen it costs 2250 euros for a 384Kb dedicated line here, for that you guys can get 3 t1 links for that price...

I agree with you k, there has to be a way for the admin to see the "bottom line" number.

As far as making the calculation - you can use a stats program to monitor bandwith of the webmail.

I suggest you do a google search for 3rd party programs that reside on your server and can log in all traffic (regardless of where its coming from/to) which will solve the problem with the different services (pop, imap, webmail, etc.)

Hi,

Ok I did some more tests this weekend regarding bandwidth.. I  run Netlimiter pro which can log and monitor to all the different services on a server.

From 2pm until 9pm Netlimeter reports received bandwidth as 220Mb and Outbound as 10Mb. This is unfortunately when I started it only so there is some traffic logging missing)

However if I do a bandwidth check on sm4 bandwidth report it only reports  received bandwidth as 45Mb and Outbound as 17Mb. Now there is some serious differences between these values. 220 to 45 is an 80% difference in traffic. and Well the outbound one I cannot really compare yet as the time lines are a bit different between netlimeter and the SM and my Bandwidth Supplier logs. However the Inbound Traffic logs are a real issue, according to mu bandwidth usage by my supplier today and the bandwidth logs of SM and Netlimeter they are way out.. BIG time.

My traffic usage from my supplier for today is : - Ip 49   Inbound 290Mb    Outbound   70Mb (This traffic is from 00:00 - 21:00)

 Again SM reports only 45Mb while my provider reports 290Mb used (from midnight lastnight till 2pm today a difference of 70Mb is about right between Netlimeter and my bandwith logs. but 45Mb to 220 / 290 is a way big difference.  And for me as an ISP who charges for bandwidth is totally unacceptable.. I will  forward more info on monday when I can give a full 24hr period of reporting from all 3 systems to compare the traffic, But I have been down this road once before with Merak and proved a point to them.  I Have asked My bandwidth provider to please log all pop/imap/smtp traffic to my specific ip addresses using port logging, it will break down the specific traffic by port which will help further..

Now you might say that netlimiter is the issue here, NO it is NOT, between myself, My Upline Bandwidth supplier and Merak we did serious tests a while back, regarding traffic and Netlimeter is not the problem it matches my used bandwidth that im charged for basically to the KB.

OK Here is the last 2 days results of my tests. On average SM4 is only reporting around 40% of ther received traffic and 50% of the sent traffic, which is pointing to to my original conclusions, that firstly the pop and SMTP traffic from the client is not being logged, as well as there is inbound traffic to users, which is received inbound, and possibly deleted and never delivered to the user as these mails are spam possibly. Maybe someone can shed some light on this as I am dumbfounded with this issue, as can be seen from my bwusage and the netlimiter reports, am using 99% or as clost to 100% traffic as my upline says I am using. But SM4 says that only 40 - 50% of that is only mail.... Now this is on only a handfull of domains, If I move all my domains to SM Servers my reporting of ftaffic is going to be out by 50% almost.. To you guys overseas this is chicken feed  I know but its like around $3000 a month here that I loose each month.. I somehow need to get this traffic into SM4 so if the users do a bandwidth report it refl;ects the actual traffic and helm will import it itself with its bandwidth collector, or I need to write a script to gen the correct results from the logs, and bring that into Helm as I currently do with Merak.

The only issue is is helm and Merak are going to be reporting 50% difference again Unless some poor soul hears my single appeal for this... lol