I have a problem at work.

We have a group Exchange Server inbox that the team use to recieve work. One person each day controls the inbox and distributes work from it.

I want to track, say over a week, who the mails are coming in from, how many per day, what time of day is busy etc... I then want to tie that in with stats we get from our phone system in order to track our work flow.

I have been searching our tech support website and Google but don't seem able to see anything that does this. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of stuff?

It seems like quite a simple request to me, and as almost every other aspect of our business has a stat reporting tool of some kind I find it frustrating that I can't find anything to help me with this.

Cheers

Cris.

I don't know of a tool that will do that offhand, but I will just suggest that you expand your search to include tools that will work for IMAP and POP servers, since Exchange can provide email via both of those protocols as well as the proprietary Exchange protocols.

In fact, I think that Exchange uses WebDAV on its Outlook Web Access interface, not that I know that it conforms to any established protocol beyond that.

Lemme see if I can condense the question:



Sounds like you're screwed no matter what.

Hmmm I was really hoping there was something that I was missing.

It is totally ridiculous that I can monitor our phone system live from any internet terminal in the world whilst looking at what phone numbers a team member dialled a year ago, but I can't tell how many emails I get into the inbox in a day.

They are really missing a trick there!

I would say 99% of our work is on email, but 0% of that can be analysed.

If it requires server side software I have no chance of getting it working as it is all done by our IT dept, I can't even run 3rd party apps on my blackberry, so not much hope of getting anything installed on the email server!

I wonder if there is another way, something like a plugin for outlook that counts emails coming in that I could just leave running 24/7.......Google it is......

Cheers

Cris.

Generally you would have those emails feeding into a real request tracking system rather than just dealing with them as emails, and that tracking system would have that sort of analysis for you.

Oh yea, we have all that, but I want to track what is actually coming into the inbox, we only log about 50% (I am told!) of the emails coming in the rest are "rubbish" and I want to understand who it is clogging up our systems.

We have a system that more stats than I though possible once the work is logged, but nothing tracks the rejects.

Cheers

Cris.

Well, what discards the rejects?

A human being, we use a manual process to transfer from the inbox to our logging system due to the nature of the work.

I think I'm going to have to leave my quest, working for a big organisation is ok until you want to do something different like this

Cheers

Cris.

Okay, one would assume that he deletes the bad emails, right? Have him move them to a different folder instead. Then a simple program to access the Exchange server via IMAP and count the emails would not be very complicated at all.

Yes in the end emails that fail the validation would be deleted.

They may sit in the inbox for a few hours before that happens.

This would involve having a PC on all the time, not ideal for us, I can't even leave a post-it note on my desk without it getting moved (still trying to figure out why the cleaners have to move EVERYTHING about) Are there any programs out there that would do this sort of things ???


Cheers

Cris

There may be, but writing a 25 line perl script to do it would take less time than finding an application. I don't think you'd need to have a computer on all the time. (Although wouldn't the person doing the sorting have his computer on?) You should be able to extract receive dates from the emails themselves (not the send dates, as they can be wildly wrong).

Of course, all of that depends on access to your email server via IMAP, and I kinda get the impression that that might not be something that your company allows.

Try this: Open a Command Prompt. Type "telnet your.mail.server 143". If it connects, try typing ". login username password". You might have to put doublequotes around your password. If that works, you're golden. If not, try "telnet your.mail.server 993". If it connects, just disconnect; this is an encrypted session and you won't be able to deal with it manually, but the fact that it answers is a good sign. If neither one connects, you're back to looking for an Exchange-specific logger.

I can get to the server with the telnet option, but can't login. Last time I tried this I got angry calls from our security centre.

On my searching travels I found Xobni which I thought the communitiy here may be interested in, it's in closed beta at the moment but it looks like it should do what I want.

Cheers

Cris.