Performance Evaluation of Mail Systems

Electronic mail is the core of modern communications. People rely on email to conduct their business and stay in touch with families and friends. The ubiquity and popularity of email make its QoS an important issue. Performance of mail systems is the result of the interactions between their hardware and software components and the user behavior, that is, how users exploit and exercise these components. This paper addresses the performance issues of mail systems by focusing on the characterization of their workloads and on benchmarking. The mail systems considered in this paper rely on Internet standard messaging protocols.