Userbase information

Mutual Help
1

I recently created an relay instance for me and my friends.
I came across the /metrics page, which showed me this :

 # HELP total number of accounts
 # TYPE accounts gauge
 accounts 15
 # HELP number of CI accounts
 # TYPE ci_accounts gauge
 ci_accounts 0
 # HELP number of non-CI accounts
 # TYPE nonci_accounts gauge
 nonci_accounts 15

I’m pretty surprised to see 15 accounts when i only have 5 or 6 friends that joined my relay right now. What are the metrics supposed to represent ?

Also, I want to be sure that this instance is not being used by bots or spam.

I took a look at the user folder on my VPS (under /home/vmail/mail/{instance_name}/) and saw that a lot of subfolders are called like “acN_xxxxx” with N is number and the rest is a random sequence. The others looks like genuine folders with ids of my friends account.
Are these folders used by the system or something ? (they are more than 15 so i dont understand how the metrics is counting ?)

Thanks a lot

2

These accounts were likely created by the tests if you ran them.

3

Thanks for your answer. It is very probable since I have run tests many times.
I’ve removed the folders since they were not used by anyone.

I still don’t understand what i’m seeing in /metrics and how it is counted ? I didnt see anything about it in the documentation.

4

These /metrics just count the folders in a cronjob. ci_accounts is the number of accounts whose name starts with ci-.

I think it should be simply removed, see Remove `/metrics` · Issue #431 · chatmail/relay · GitHub and Remove /metrics from the website by link2xt · Pull Request #703 · chatmail/relay · GitHub, you get better overview buy simply looking at the folders with ls.

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5

We preferred if /metrics stayed. It gives a much nicer overview in a chatmail server overview list (to be shared with you later) based on which new users would be able to spread the load among servers. Many Fediverse comparison charts have the same feature of showing registered users (or monthly active users) and total posts for each instance.

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