[Mimedefang] Message sizes

[David F. Skoll]

Jan-Pieter Cornet wrote:

> I am seeing vastly different numbers... You actually made me recalculate
> the average mail size again :) last time I did that was more than a year
> ago, and then I saw 30K incoming 100K outgoing, on average.

Wow!

Our mail traffic is very different.  (Granted, it's also very very low.)

I took a look at the last 7988 messages in our log (about 3.5 days'
worth) and the average size is around 15,600 bytes.

Counts are:

< 10:      0
< 100:     0
< 1K:    287
< 10K:  5908
< 100K: 1702
< 1M:     74
< 10M:    16
> 100M:    1

(K = 1000 and M = 1000 000, not 1024 and 1024^2)

This is both incoming and outgoing mail.

I took a larger sample from an ISP customer of ours.
I looked at 724 915 messages and saw an average size
(incoming) of about 32000 bytes/message.  The histogram
looked like this:

10:       18
100:      72
1K:    39455
10K:  496926
100K: 174784
1M:     9754
10M:    3791
100M:    115

This sample matches the xs2all histogram quite nicely.
100K outbound average seems large!  Maybe non-spam messages
tend to be larger than spam, with M$ attachments, etc.

Regards,

David.