2005-07-17
How many places actually send us email?
A few weeks ago I discovered that only 220 different IP addresses sent us actual email over the course of a week. This naturally raises the question: was this just a slow week, or is this typical? The answer turns out to be 'maybe'.
On the system I usually run my stats on, I only have logs going back about 28 days; looking at the entire time period, there was email from 443 different IP addresses. Not surprisingly, the distribution of how much email comes from where is very uneven, with almost all of the email we get is from a few mailing list hosts and the campus-wide email system.
On another system I have logs going back almost a year. Over that time, we got email from only 1,427 different IP addresses (only 95,000 email messages, though). On this system, the big source of email turns out to be Yahoo's webmail, and again things have a very sharp dropoff.
While this has practical uses for our specific situation, the more I think about it the less I think it really generalizes very well. Most of the people here use the central campus-wide email system and at most have their email forwarded from there to our systems; only a relatively few are still using our systems as their primary email system.
The usual quick rejection stats for 2005-07-16