A Campus-Level View of Outlook Email Traffic

This paper presents a workload characterization study of Outlook email traffic, as viewed at a campus scale. Using a combination of passive and active approaches to network traffic measurement, we identify the key components in the email delivery infrastructure, and then characterize the email traffic on our campus network, using a month of empirical network measurement data. The main observations from our study include the complexity of modern email services, the strong diurnal patterns for human-driven email activities, and the low throughput achieved for large email attachments.