Averages are fairly useless - use median instead. If you look at a flat average on a typical workload, you will find that the average is determined by a very small number of messages taking days to be delivered to some dial-up system or other. One day the users in question sign off, your average is halved and management congratulates you for having solved the problem without a costly hardware upgrade. On the other hand, it is meaningful to know that 98% of the messages are delivered in under a minute and 90% in under 6 seconds. The "slow destinations" factor is usually between 1-2% in a typical Internet environment, it should be much lower for intranet distributions (hopefully!) Eric