How any Exchange ActiveSync clients do you serve?

Question asked by Jay Dubb - 11/17/2021 at 3:05 PM

Unanswered

Here's a question for those currently providing Exchange ActiveSync services. How many licenses do you have in use right now? More than a few?

We just bought 1,400 licenses to bring on a large client who wants Exchange level services. The first 55 users have migrated over and our bandwidth consumption went crazy. You can see the graphs here.

https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a94474/webmail-and-eas-do-they-really-use-this-much-bandwidth.aspx

For those of you who have more than a few EAS users, how is bandwidth consumption on your server? We run an Exchange server with about 1,000 active users in medical and legal environments, yet the bandwidth consumption on the Smartermail server with 55 EAS users is more than QUADRUPLE that of the 1000-user Exchange server. Some days it is 8 to 10 times higher.

Our lead admin (one of the company owners) is having a fit, because we're about to migrate more than 1,300 EAS-enabled users to the SM server in the next 3 weeks. If their per-user average traffic is anywhere near what the first 55 users added, the Smartermail server will exhaust a full Gigabit connection. Whoever heard of a mail server with less than 2000 users saturating a Gigabit link?

We are seeing about 6 TERABYTES of monthly outbound traffic on a domain with only 390 GB of mailbox storage in use. SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 reports only show LOW single-digit GB consumption per day, so this HAS to be sync traffic.

Something is VERY WRONG.

He currently has a ticket open with ST Support, but it's NOT going well. So far the only suggestion is to turn off push notifications and switch to checking every 15 minutes, which has him pretty upset. That is neither a solution nor an option.

He asked me to find out what other EAS admins are seeing. We've discussed internally, and our current working theory is maybe SM is doing a full mailbox download every time a mobile device re-syncs, instead of just syncing the changes.

Anyone have ideas, theories, thoughts, or any advice that might help?

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Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

11/19/2021 at 4:09 AM

In fact, I too am noticing a high traffic on the SmarterMail server (both in upload and download).

More or less, I have about 30GB to 180GB of UPLOAD (towards users) per day.

Calculating that in the SmarterMail statistics the sum of SMTP, IMAP and POP3 does not exceed 10-15GB (as you can see in the following image), I deduce that the rest of the traffic is generated by MAPI / EWS or by EAS (the latter is probably the culprit).

It would be interesting to understand WHAT generates this exaggerated traffic, because if EAS actually causes so much traffic with few users (I have about 40), it will soon become a problem as the number of users grows ...

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

Jay Dubb Replied

11/19/2021 at 9:39 AM

I'm really hoping they will include IIS/EWS/MAPI bandwidth statistics (sooner than later) in an upcoming build, because the bulk of the traffic seems to be there.

The POP/SMTP/IMAP charts are helpful and appreciated, and I'd really like to see the other protocols included. When just 55 newly-added users drive upwards of 6 TB per month outbound, we would *really* like to know who, how, and why. What we DO know is, it's not outbound SMTP and they don't use IMAP or POP3.

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