A reader who is both an enterprise dashboard enthusiast and professional email spam fighter sent me a screenshot of the dashboard he uses to monitor his email system.  Composed of both chart-based and text portlets, this dashboard nicely summarizes the state of the email system from the perspective of virus and spam management. The left side columns include mail usage statistics (incoming mail, delivered mail, blocked mail and amount of data transferred), blocked mail statistics (virus and spam information), denied mail summary (sender, recipient, or attachment blocked), usage summary and RBL statistics.  For those who don’t know, RBL stands for Realtime Blackhole List, a list of addresses associated with spamming.

The right side of this enterprise dashboard is a visual collection of relevant metrics. KPIs that are graphed include email system activity, top 5 email recipients, top 5 virus recipients and top 5 spam recipients. All in all, a nicely laid out system management dashboard.