i'm in a similar situation - i think. unlike most of the folk who
populate this list, i'm not 'mail-centric.' we provide email as a
convenience to our web site customers. we have a few customers who have
large numbers of accounts and those we charge anywhere from $2 to $3 per
mailbox per month. it's certainly not a revenue generator, but the
beauty of using surgemail is that it just sits there and runs, so it
doesn't take much for us to support it.
i don't know what your business (or configuration) is, but if you're
truly concerned about the mail server sucking large amounts of
bandwidth, you might consider putting a limiter in front of it. i also
believe there are parameters in the configuration you can adjust, but
i've not used them, so i don't know what they are.
david camm
advanced web systems
keller, tx
On 3/8/2011 6:44 PM, Tony Zakula wrote:
> Thank you for the responses. I was planning to bill/setup a limit for
> bandwidth per customer. However, the way I have it now, I have one ip
> address and am using virtual hosts on surgemail. I guess I did not
> really think about how to account for mail traffic. I could see not
> really worrying about it, but what if you have a customer getting and
> sending tons of messages. I was planning to offer 10 free email
> accounts and then charge a fee for everyone above that. I am still at
> a low number of customers so nothing is a problem yet, but just trying
> to think ahead.
>
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:21 PM, David CammHIDDEN@advwebsys.com> wrote:
>> the real question, imho, is what you want to measure. and what you want to
>> bill for.
>>
>> when someone sends a message to one of your customers, that message is x
>> bytes. when your customer sends a message to an external server, that's y
>> bytes.
>>
>> if your customer uses pop to download messages to a client, he (she)
>> downloads n bytes in that download.
>>
>> if they use surgeweb, they transfer z bytes during a session, which of
>> course, includes the web pages.
>>
>> if they use imap at all, then disk utilization may be a billable resource -
>> i had one customer who accumulated over 5G of messages and never realized
>> they needed to prune things once in a while. i wonder how long it took to
>> load their inbox....
>>
>> bytes of thruput can be converted to bandwidth - i BELIEVE 221Gb of transfer
>> in one month is equivalent to 1Mb/sec.
>>
>> i frankly don't know where or whether this info is available in the myriad
>> of logs. but, if it is, it is certainly possible to extract it with some
>> neat grepping and perl scripting.
>>
>> we do this on our shared web servers for customers with heavy ftp traffic.
>> on the first of the month, we look at the ftp transfer logs for the previous
>> month and accumulate transferred bytes (in and out) by user. we can then
>> bill based on total transfer. we even keep history in a little mysql
>> database.
>>
>> david camm
>> advanced web systems
>> keller, tx
>>
>>
>> On 3/8/2011 5:00 PM, VinnyHIDDEN@@Dell.com wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't, but if you had each domain on a different IP address, you could
>>> easily turn on ip accounting on a Cisco device and measure it via SNMP... or
>>> just via the Cisco CLI.
>>>
>>> -Vinny
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Tony Zakula [mailtoHIDDEN@kula@gmail.com]
>>> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 3:57 PM
>>> To: surgemailHIDDEN@etwinsite.com
>>> Subject: [SurgeMail List] Bandwidth Accounting
>>>
>>> Does anyone do bandwidth accounting for their email services?
>>> Especially if you are running lots of domains on one mail server and web
>>> services on other servers? If so, what do you use to measure per customer?
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> Tony Z
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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