On Linux Planet: Plotting mail logs with CairoPlot (Shallow Thoughts)

On Linux Planet: Plotting mail logs with CairoPlot

My latest LinuxPlanet article is on plotting pretty graphs from Python with CairoPlot.

Of course, to demonstrate a graphing package I needed some data. So I decided to plot some stats parsed from my Postfix mail log file. We bounce a lot of mail (mostly spam but some false positives from mis-configured email servers) that comes in with bogus HELO addresses. So I thought I'd take a graphical look at the geographical sources of those messages.

The majority were from IPs that weren't identifiable at all -- no reverse DNS info. But after that, the vast majority turned out to be, surprisingly, from .il (Israel) and .br (Brazil).

Surprised me! What fun to get useful and interesting data when I thought I was just looking for samples for an article.