Mailwatch: Mailing list reporting

MailWatch is a program to analyze mail moving through a mailing list. As each message is received, it gathers a summary of the message and stores it into a log. Later, Mailwatch can generate a textual report, showing number of posts during a time period, who the most prolific posters were, and what the most popular topics were.

Mailwatch can be installed as an alias to a mailing list on a local system by using a piped alias, like this:

  mail-list:	"!/usr/local/bin/mw.pl"

or it can be driven by Procmail. I used procmail for my setup, which requires a rule like this:

  :c
  ^(To|Cc): .*jobseekers.*
  | /usr/local/bin/formail -a "Status: O" 
  >> /u/shevett/Mail/somelist

  :
  ^(To|Cc): .*somelist.*
  | bin/mw.pl

Note that for this mail (mail from the 'somelist' mailing list), I already had a rule in place for it, so I needed to add the 'c' (continue) flag on the original rule, and add another rule.

Without any command line parameters, Mailwatch processes stdin into a summary line, and put it out on stdout. Normally, you'd want to log this information into a file via the '-l' option, for later processing.

  Usage: mw4.pl [-s] [-V] [-l logfile] 
               [-t title] [-d days] [-n number]
  -s           Output a summary instead of taking input.
  -V           Show version information.
  -v           Be verbose - show processing information 
               while working.
  -l logfile   Use this logfile instead of STDIN and 
               STDOUT. (If you have trouble with 
               suid/sgid, don't use this.)
  -t title     Display this title on the top of the 
               Summary 
               Report instead of the default, the logfile 
               name.
  -d days      Look back this many days instead of the 
               default of 7.
  -n topnumber Display this number of Top Posters and 
               Subjects instead of the default of 10.
  -y           Don't evaluate today's mail. Only look at 
               yesterday and before.
 
  mw4.pl takes email, distills it and writes out summary 
  information. When invoked with the "-s" option, it 
  analyses and prints out interesting summary information.
 
  IE. Pipe your favorite mailing list traffic into: 
  mw4.pl -l maillog
  In a week, run:  mw4.pl -s -l maillog 

Sample reports:

Virus Report - Mailwatch is used here to track how many virii are being caught in a mail gateway.
Spam report - Here we're using Mailwatch to see how much mail is being caught via spam filters on a daily basis to a single user (yes, those are real numbers :)

Licensing and Downloads

Mailwatch is distributed under the Artistic License.

The code is ever-evolving. The latest version is version 0.44, and is available here, and requires Perl5 to run.

The Latest News about Mailwatch...

Mailwatch v0.44 uploaded

v0.44 of Mailwatch has been posted. Changes in this release:

* Fixed formatting errors in breakdown by day
* Take into account more than one message a second
* Mix re Re RE RE[2] subjects into the same thread