The short version
- Red Line Software's Mail Access Monitor and Printer Activity Monitor were, in their time, elegant solutions to a specific problem: parsing the logs that mail servers and print spoolers already produced and turning them into usage reports.
- Modern enterprise email rarely lives on a single on-premises server that hands you a clean log file.
- The right choice still comes down to three factors: budget, your team's capacity to configure and maintain the tool, and the actual environment you're monitoring.
01The tools Red Line Software built still point to a real need — here's what fills it now
Red Line Software's Mail Access Monitor and Printer Activity Monitor were, in their time, elegant solutions to a specific problem: parsing the logs that mail servers and print spoolers already produced, then turning that raw text into legible usage reports. No agents, no complex infrastructure — just the logs that existed anyway, read by software that knew what to look for. That agentless philosophy was ahead of its time, and the need it served hasn't disappeared. IT admins still want to know which mailboxes are hammering an Exchange server, which department is running the printer into the ground, and whether that spike in outbound SMTP traffic is a bulk mailer or something worse.
What has changed is everything around the edges: the mail infrastructure itself, the print environment, and the available tooling.
02What mail and print monitoring looks like in 2026
Modern enterprise email rarely lives on a single on-premises server that hands you a clean log file. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace handle the transport layer, and the usage data lives in their own admin portals — Microsoft's unified audit log and the Google Workspace Admin console both surface per-user send/receive volumes, login activity, and mailbox sizes. For organisations that have moved fully to the cloud, that's often sufficient, and no third-party tool is needed.
Where it gets interesting is hybrid environments, self-hosted mail (Postfix, Dovecot, Exchange on-premises), or situations where the built-in reporting isn't granular enough. Here the original log-parsing approach still works well. Postfix and Dovecot produce structured logs that feed naturally into an ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or Grafana with a Loki backend — both free, both capable of the per-user, per-domain breakdowns that Mail Access Monitor used to provide through a Windows GUI. The pipeline is more to set up, but the visibility is comparable and the dashboards are considerably more flexible.
For organisations that want a packaged tool rather than a self-assembled observability stack, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) remains one of the more capable commercial options. It monitors over 200 application templates — including Exchange, IIS, and a range of Linux services — ships with built-in alerting and automated reporting, and offers a 30-day free trial for evaluation. It is not a like-for-like mail-log parser in the old sense; it monitors application health and resource usage rather than reading individual message activity. But for an IT team that needs to know whether an Exchange server is under stress and which components are responsible, SAM covers that ground well.
Nagios Core, the free open-source tier of the Nagios platform, takes a different approach — it monitors service states and can alert on SMTP queue depth, connection counts, or any custom metric you can script. The initial setup curve is steep, and some of the more polished reporting features are reserved for the paid Nagios XI edition. But for teams with technical capacity and a tight budget, Core is genuinely powerful once past the configuration phase.
Ganglia occupies a narrower niche: it was built for high-performance computing clusters and large distributed environments, and it shows. Its efficient data structures make it a natural fit for universities and research institutions monitoring dozens of nodes. For a typical small-to-medium office environment, it is probably more infrastructure than the problem warrants.
Print monitoring has followed a similar trajectory. Modern print servers — Windows Server's print spooler, PaperCut, or the embedded accounting in networked Ricoh, Konica Minolta, and HP fleet printers — already log job-level detail: user, document name, page count, time. PaperCut MF and PaperCut NG remain the dominant dedicated solutions for organisations that need cross-platform print accounting, cost allocation by department, and quota enforcement. For smaller setups, the Windows print spooler event log, parsed with PowerShell or fed into a log aggregator, provides the same raw data without licensing cost.
03Choosing
The right choice still comes down to three factors: budget, your team's capacity to configure and maintain the tool, and the actual environment you're monitoring — cloud-first, on-premises, or hybrid. Start with whatever free tier or trial is available before committing. And keep in mind that for email and print specifically, the best monitoring tool is often the one already built into the platform you're running — check there first before adding new software to the stack.
