According to our mail server logs, not surprisingly, almost exactly half of the mail Gustavus mail users receive is from other people at Gustavus. What may surprise some is that Facebook accounts for about 34% of the mail we receive. Here’s a graph from yesterday, which is pretty typical for a weekday.
By gathering and analysing this data, we’ve been able to make several dramatic system improvements. Most notably, we are now bypassing our spam scanner for any mail sent from an authenticated Gustavus user or Facebook. This should make delivering mail to other Gustavus users much faster and reduce the load on our spam scanning servers because they only have to scan about 15% of their old load so they should give faster results for everything else too.
I know what you’re thinking – “What if someone spams my facebook account!?” – well… our spam scanner wouldn’t catch it anyway since the message from facebook would just say something pointless like “Bob has posted on your wall” and not the actual spam message.
If you’ve got any other suggestions of statistics which might be useful or ways to use this information, we’d love to look into it! Just send an e-mail to root@gac.edu.
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