[mrtg] Mail Statistics from Spamassassin with MRTG

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 08:45:20AM +0200, Pfirter Lukas wrote:

> When I run mrtg, it seems to work right but the data files mail.log and
> mail.old only have numbers in the first line:
> 1184740210 17 2323
> 1184740210 0 0 0 0
> 1184739909 0 0 0 0
> 
> These numbers are slowly incrementing as mails come into my server
> (there should be about one mail per 5 minutes average). But nothing is
> displayed in the graphs and no numbers are put into the log file below
> the first line. What am I missing? I know I can't use the gauge option
> as this is not a "current status" option but a incrementing number. Is
> the number of incoming mail to my server too small?

Probably.

One mail per five minutes would translate into .0033333333 mail
per second. That's 0 when you truncate.

Look at the numbers a couple of times: Write them down, wait five
minutes, look+write again, compute the difference in time and the
difference for each of the two values.  Divide each delta(value)
by delta(time). Truncate the result.  Repeat.  This is basically
what MRTG is doing.

If this is indeed the problem, try 'perhour' (see the docs).

HTH
Alex