Shepheard said:
I am trying to figure out a way to track the traffic/activity of an email
router box.
An e-mail router box. And what is that? You actually have a router through
which you can somehow guarantee that only e-mail traffic will pass and
connects to a separate ISP than for your normal web traffic through another
router and to another ISP?
Enable the router's log if you want to see to where it is connecting but
that will be for all connections made by your router to your ISP for all
hosts connected to that router. You might be able to use WallWatcher to
give you a nicer display of the router's log.
If you want to see where specific type of traffic is going then you need to
use a packet sniffer to monitor your intranet traffic before the router (or
replace the router with a host running as a gateway to do the routing).
Ethereal (now called Wireshark) is often recommended for packet sniffing.
Nirsoft's SmartSniff is another one. I haven't used either because I
haven't yet needed to spy on other users of my network. These tools may be
able to filter out all but traffic over specific ports, like those commonly
use for e-mail (110, 995, 25, 587, 465 - but 80 could also be used which
would confuse it with web browser traffic). Filtering packets based on
content usually involves a pretty robust network monitor and might slow your
traffic.
