What is Communications Data?

[Ian G Batten]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Roland Perry wrote:

> In message <B9FEAB01.26385%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>, Peter Fairbrother
> <zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk> writes
> >> Traffic data in a log of a number of communications might well be 21(4)(b).
> >
> >So (a) data might be in (b)? Didn't you just say the opposite?
> 
> No, that's  non-sequitur. If a POP3 log has in it things like:
> 
> "4 emails collected at 16.45.00"

If that.  Cyrus, which is used by both business and ISPs, has such
fascinating logging as:

1037616150.453 Nov 18 10:42:30 login: XXX.demon.co.uk[62.49.XXX] XXX plaintext

and that's it: no trace of what was done, no shutdown message.  

Think IMAP will be any more informative?  Er, no:

1037638749.287 Nov 18 16:59:09 login: localhost.localdomain[127.0.0.1] igb CRAM-MD5+TLS User logged in

And that's it.  Rightly so, because although POP sessions can be
summarised as ``X collected, Y deleted'' it's not a little harder to
summarise an IMAP session in a line or two.

ian