How JEMHC Calculates Data Usage
Usage Calculation
JEMHC counts each of the following actions as a message that will count on your monthly quota:
An outbound mail server is manually pinged/tested through the UI to test its configuration/connectivity.
An email is pulled from a mail server into JEMHC.
An outbound email is sent. This includes uncaught emails that get forwarded.
These messages will be added together to calculate your monthly quota. The total number of messages and the total amount of data (e.g. megabytes) will be tracked.
Inbound
For inbound mail, the received message size is used that includes encoded content / attachments. Emails may contain either/both of “text/plain” and “text/html” versions of the content, they are both aggregated regardless of which is selected. Attachments are typically sent encoded (base64), content can also be so encoded (sometimes for ‘privacy'), encoded content size ‘increases’ over the underlying content. This can be shown by exporting a mail from JEMHC auditing, the generated text file size is what JEMHC uses for inbound mail. The JEMHC > Exclusions we have for attachments excludes the files from being added to Jira but have no effect on data usage.
Outbound
For Outbound mail we sum up the encoded content payload we sent (usually text/html) and the sum of attachments added (prior to encoding).
By default we use BCC for delivery, if you set TO: as the delivery method, this will result in a multiplier effect based on the number of issue recipients. Content is rendered in the context of each recipient, if the content is common over all recipients, only one mail needs to be sent, if the content ‘changes’ the different content recipient ‘groups’ occur, having a lesser multiplier effect. NOTE: default templates do not include multiplier effect outcomes, you would have to configure ‘conditionally’ included content.
Example Scenarios
Action | Message Increase | Data Increase | Message Total | Data Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Email pulled into JEMHC from Message Source, processed and injected into Jira. | +1 | +1Mb | 1 | 1Mb |
Email pulled into JEMHC from Message Source, ignored because no recipients match the profile's catch-email address, not forwarded because of the profile's configuration. | +1 | +1Mb | 2 | 2Mb |
JEMHC receives a webhook from Jira, but ignores it because the Notification Mapping finds no recipients | +0 | +0Mb | 2 | 2Mb |
JEMHC receives a webhook from Jira, and sends it because the Notification Mapping finds recipients. The recipients have the same view-level, so it includes them in one email. | +1 | +1Mb | 3 | 3Mb |
JEMHC pulls in an email but finds that it doesn't satisfy the Profile's catch-email configuration and forwards it because of the profile's configuration. | +2 | +2Mb | 5 | 5Mb |
Note - The email size of 1Mb is just an example.
An email message is pulled into JEMHC from a mail server.
An outbound email is sent (including forwarded emails).
Ways to lower usage
Blacklisting attachments
Blacklisting images and attachments using JEMHC's Blacklisting feature will decrease the data consumption of your messages. Blacklisting won't decrease the data consumption for inbound messages because JEMHC has to pull in the entire message to work on it. Blacklisting will only affect the data consumption for outbound messages.
Pointing JEMHC at its very own mailbox
It's advised that you use non-human mailboxes for message sources so only necessary emails get picked up by JEMHC. All emails that get pulled into JEMHC that don't match your catch-email configuration will count on your quota - doubly so if JEMHC has been configured to forward the uncaught emails.
Disable outbound attachments
Attachments on tickets will be included in outbound notifications. You can omit ticket attachments from outbound notifications with a setting found in the Notification Mapping.
Example involving inbound and outbound processing
This example goes through the process of JEMHC polling a mailbox where it discovers one email containing a 100Kb attachment. The total size of the email is ~140Kb. JEMHC automatically creates a ticket containing the attachment. The status of the Jira ticket is manually changed and JEMHC automatically sends out an outbound email notification including the attachment because a Notification Mapping exists to do so (See Create an Email Notification Mapping for how to do so). We then amend the Notification Mapping so that it won't include attachments and we trigger another notification.
Here you can see an essentially clean usage metric.
Then we process an email containing a 100Kb attachment. The total size of the email is ~140Kb.
The ticket is set to done triggering an outbound notification because an email Notification Mapping is present in this JEMHC configuration (not shown). By default the attachment on the ticket is included as an attachment in the notification.
Here we go into the email Notification Mapping and disable the inclusion of attachments.
We then replay the same event that triggered the outbound notification using the the Auditing view, and we can see that far less data has been used compared to the previous outbound email notification.