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A study of e‐mail patterns
Author(s) -
Shah Sam,
Noble Brian D.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.816
Subject(s) - computer science , burstiness , benchmarking , electronic mail , server , the internet , redundancy (engineering) , computer network , world wide web , operating system , network packet , marketing , business
Although electronic mail is an increasingly important service, there are few empirical studies of e‐mail traffic. We have observed over 2.85 million messages passing through our departmental servers over the course of seven months, and derived distributions that approximate several important e‐mail parameters including message sizes, message senders and receivers and the burstiness of message deliveries. Our work is unique in that we also analyse message payloads: attachment content types, e‐mail redundancy, and the use of e‐mail as a sharing mechanism. These data can be used in developing e‐mail workloads for mail system engineering or benchmarking. To this end, we provide an improved version of Postmark, a small‐file Internet benchmark, that better approximates mail server characteristics. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.