Running the Tophosts Command

[pgolshan]

This is a simple question regarding the 'Tophosts' command.  I need to understand how to interpret the output. Below is an example output:

Recipient Host                    Acive Recip.           Conn. Out          Deliv. Recip.          Soft Bounced          Hard Bounced

1* Yahoo.com                         7,055                         0               182,000                    38,548                    13,987

2* hotmail.com.mx                   144                           0                    0                              0                              2

3* acme.com                            131                          0                    3                             3,166                         6

Does Active Recepients mean current active connections?

What does connections out mean?

Does Delivery Recipients refer to mail delivered to that many recipients or mail waiting to be delivered?

What does soft and hard bounced mean?

I am very new to Ironport and this was just dropped in my lap.

Any light shed on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Christopher Smith]

Greetings,

Active recipients is basically a count of the number of messages waiting in the delivery queue. This is not the same as the number of connections.  Connections out basically shows you the number of "current" connections on progress to that destination host. Delivered recipients is the number of successful deliveries to that destination host since the last reboot of the appliance. Soft bounces are messages that got bounced by the recipient domain but have not expired and are waiting for a retry. This retry pattern typically follows, attempt, if the attempt fails, try again in 3 min, then again in 3 min, then 3 hours , then 3 days. If after 3 days we can  not deliver the message to the destination the message will expire and this is what is known as a hard bounce. At that point the sender is notified their message failed. Addtionally you can get specifics on a host using the hoststatus command from the CLI.

You can find more details on tophost in the online users guide. While in the GUI if you go to the upper right hand corner and select help, then online help this brings up help for the current section your in. You can also search the help using the search panel on your left. If you search for tophosts you can find additional information. You may also want to explore bounce profiles as well.

Christopher C Smith

CSE

Cisco IronPort Customer Support

[pgolshan]

Thank you. Much appreciated.