Dan,

This 13GB DB, is it MySQL??

How well is the quarantine DB performing??

Cheers

StevenJohns,

Our mail logs go back to 1999 but we do not care what the content of a message was/is except for our own internal mail and we use an exchange clone for that.  Our SpamFilter Quarantine expires between 2 and 14 days depending on the company we are supporting.  Our DB is about 13BG for that.

WebGuys,

We are not "public" but we are an ISP (privately owned).

Dan,

I can see where you are comming from. As Webguyz says, there is no one size fits all, give us the option of how WE want to do our logging, rather than how we are TOLD that we have to do it. That's all.

By the way, as  LogSat was clearly worried about the size of the database....exactly how big is your DB?? If you have 250MB of logs each day, then your quarantine DB must be huge. If you keep your logs for over 14 months, is it reasonable to assume that you keep the quarantined email for as log too??

What would be the point of having a log saying "you emailed fred at 5:30 on 5/5/06, but I have no idea what the email content was"?

I don't mean to sound picky, just wondered what an ISP of your size does.

Cheers

Desperado,

  Since there is no 'One Size Fits All' then having a choice would be great. You can keep text logging or go with DB, the key is having the choice.

You must be a public company to have to keep records for that long. Mine are deleted after 3 months. Can't give anyone what I don't have.

We really need to get all the stats directly from SF

As I suggested, this could be an option that you can turn on or off, also logging to text files could also be a turn on/off option so as to not upset people who have written apps based on the text logging.

If there is a problem with the database, then you could write these critical errors to text files.

With reference to the size of the logs, these people could, as I suggested earlier periodically either delete or export entries that are x days/months old. And, if you have customers with 100s MB of text logs every day, can you imagine the hassle they must have parsing these?? How do they efficiently trace a connection in real time to diagnose problems???? VERY hard I would suggest.

As mentioned in other forum posts, logging is an ESSENTIAL part of a professional ISP, not one that apperas to be an afterthought,Just search your forum and see how many people are having problems with parsing the current text logs....why???? just stick the logs into a database (it's not hard, we already have one !) ....I bet 99% of your customers would be happier.

Implementing this would cater for all current objections and you would have some great logging which we could use for both diagnostics and getting some easy statistics. For instance, we currently log everything to our main reporting DB so that each customer can get stats and graphs of exactly how many emails they have received within a certain time frame, and more importantly (for our billing) how much crap we have stopped going to their domain / mailbox. Our customers DEMAND this type of logging/reporting, othrewise how will they know what they are paying for ?????