Merce Broadside has powerful control and logging features. All the data captured through those means must be made visible through powerful reports. It is important to provide a set of pre-designed reports and then leave powerful access mechanisms open for extensions and customised report generation. Merce Broadside takes care of both these aspects.
Standard reports. Merce Broadside supports a set of standard reports which are universally applicable to all installations. These are very useful for getting details for one application, one round of mail transmission (also referred to as one campaign), or overall system activity during a time period. The result will be displayed as a table and can be exported into a spreadsheet.
Customised reports. Merce Broadside can generate highly customisable reports about each message which leaves the system. When the pre-processor submits a message to the dispatcher for onward processing, it also submits a customised set of attributes with the message, which are then logged into the Broadside logs together with the core attributes. Later, reports can be generated from the per-message logs by looking up these customised attributes, without any programming being needed. It is possible to generate reports like "Show me all recipients whose emails got stuck in the outgoing queues and never reached them, for the campaign ID 26AS-PYQ1 of the application bulkmail-retailIndia betweeen 30 Apr 2009 and 2 May 2009."
Direct database access. Merce Broadside permits the development of customised reporting software with direct SQL access to its internal database. In keeping with the overall Merce philosophy of encouraging enterprise integration and providing a foundation for customised extensions, Merce Broadside allows reporting engines and customised applications direct access to the raw database tables where it stores its per-message logs. The data can be queried using industry-standard SQL queries and accessed using the ODBC or JDBC protocols. This allows any degree of customised reporting to be added.
Bounce processing. All incoming messages that reach the Merce Broadside system from the Internet, including bounce messages, are processed and logged. These messages are filtered through spam and virus filters first, to resist DoS attacks, and are put through a content-parsing filter to analyse whether they are bounce messages. If yes, they are correlated against the specific outgoing message which resulted in the bounce, and appropriate reasons and error types are extracted from the bounce and logged in the message log. This information is available for reports later.
