Auditing email traffic for each staff member?

[Miscbrah]

Hi gang,

 

SMT are flirting with the idea of auditing emails in an effort to, well, cut down on emails so we all have less work. Mine is not to question the logic of that one, just to click the buttons.

 

Anyway...

 

Anybody know of a way to audit mail traffic so I could graph by, say, user and how many emails they might get in a day/week/%timeperiod% or send out in that time, or the global mail traffic going down the pipes in a day or something?

 

Running Exchange 2003 and Puremessage.

 

Ideas and bits and bobs or musings hugely appreciated (including ones like "get new SMT.")

[steve]

Puremessage gives some graphs on the number of emails scanned.

 

Otherwise you could log all emails in exchange and do some analysis of them.

[pete]

Without knowing the scale of the problem (or if there is a problem).....

 

they're conscious of avoiding:

 

a) Paper notes replacing email

b) People not communicating

c) Lacking an audit trail for when people are being idiots? (For example: I use email for corresponding with slackers because there's a clear audit trail.)

 

Right?

[Miscbrah]

Without knowing the scale of the problem (or if there is a problem).....

 

they're conscious of avoiding:

 

a) Paper notes replacing email

b) People not communicating

c) Lacking an audit trail for when people are being idiots? (For example: I use email for corresponding with slackers because there's a clear audit trail.)

 

Right?

 

Kinda. I think what they're going for is some initiative (oh wow I hate that word) to achieve a work/life balance, whereby emails cease at 7pm (just queue up in the SMTP queue) and start again at 7am (open SMTP floodgates.) The obvious problem I can see is that you'll get as many emails, they just all arrive at 7am when you've got no time and lessons to go teach.

 

To get that ball rolling I'm sure they want to whip each other up into a meaningless frenzy, and would like to go forearmed with some statistics. I'm to generate these statistics somehow.

 

Any good plugins going?

 

Thanks btw Steve - any ideas how to go about that?

[Miscbrah]

Puremessage gives some graphs on the number of emails scanned.

 

Otherwise you could log all emails in exchange and do some analysis of them.

 

Actually Steve this inspired me and after a little rummaging I checked out the Exchange Log Analyzer.

 

Now happily browsing the log files! 30 day free trial and doesn't bugger up the server

[sonofsanta]

Kinda. I think what they're going for is some initiative (oh wow I hate that word) to achieve a work/life balance, whereby emails cease at 7pm (just queue up in the SMTP queue) and start again at 7am (open SMTP floodgates.) The obvious problem I can see is that you'll get as many emails, they just all arrive at 7am when you've got no time and lessons to go teach.

 

How about... they act like adults and take responsibility for their work/life balance themselves? This is why I don't have my work email set up on my phone (or at least, don't have it set up to automatically sync)

 

If someone wants to be sending emails at 9pm, that's up to them. There's no need for an immediate response, otherwise it would have been a phone call. If there's a sentiment that staff need to be seen sending emails at ridiculous o' clock to prove how dedicated they are, that's another issue altogether.

[pete]

Sorry boss, I didn't know about the $horribly_broken_network_thing, because our monitoring kit sends alerts by email and the emails stop at 7pm don't they? That's why nothing was powered up this morning.

 

Oh, you mean to say work/life balance doesn't apply to me?

[sonofsanta]

Sorry boss, I didn't know about the $horribly_broken_network_thing, because our monitoring kit sends alerts by email and the emails stop at 7pm don't they? That's why nothing was powered up this morning.

 

Oh, you mean to say work/life balance doesn't apply to me?

 

Well you should have heard the UPS click in from your mattress in the corner of the server room, what do you need email alerts for?

[Miscbrah]

If someone wants to be sending emails at 9pm, that's up to them. There's no need for an immediate response, otherwise it would have been a phone call. If there's a sentiment that staff need to be seen sending emails at ridiculous o' clock to prove how dedicated they are, that's another issue altogether.

 

On a marginally related note, we once had a member of SMT do exactly this! Emails would come in at 10-11pm... You could almost sense she was DYING to scoff a response in staff briefing of "well, that's still MY working day!"

 

At the time I suffered irregular sleep patterns so, at 3:30-4:30am I would reply and CC as many people as possible, hopefully smashing her efforts into the floor whilst evoking the odd raised eyebrow and perhaps "what the ACTUAL f- is he doing at 4 am?!!?!"

[Oaktech]

I have work email on my phone and i regularly get emails from the head/finance/HR/ 'out of hours'. The current record was 1.10am from the head. The terribly sad thing was i was sat on my laptop reading the WSUS guides and so could answer immediately. I don't think there's nothing wrong with my work-work* balance.

 

*Work i do at work Vs. Work I do at home.