On modeling the email traffic of the Technical University of Crete

Abstract

E-mail has become a de-facto means of communication. Mail servers try to manage the explosive growth of e-mail usage and offer good quality of service to the users, while spam e-mails are expected to account for 90% of the e-mail traffic. The exceedingly heavy workload can lead to the replacement of existing e-mail servers due to their inability to cope with performance standards and storing capacity. In this study, we try to model the workload of the Technical University of Crete e-mail servers, for all types of traffic (spam, user and system e-mails). We collected a vast amount of e-mail logs with high variations in terms of size and volume over time. We tested some of the most popular distributions for workload characterization and used powerful statistical tests to evaluate our findings. Interestingly we come to different conclusions in comparison with previous works in the field. Our work indicates that, with the exception of some outliers, email traffic can be modeled and predicted quite well.