For those of you who pay for to use the Google Apps services for businesses, you know have the ability to conduct a Gmail log search, which is, after reading the description, something akin to Google Analytics for your Gmail account. The tool is aimed at domain admins who want a clear picture concerning the who, what, when, where and why of their domain’s email traffic.

Over at the Google Enterprise Blog, the functionality of the Gmail log search is explained, including what kind of information a domain admin can expect to find with the new search feature:

• Basic message information like Sender, Recipient, Subject, Date and Message-ID
• Attachment size
• Total transit time
• Delivery status

Google is also using its cloud storage facilities to help facilitate this capability:

This Gmail log search feature was built using Google BigQuery, a Google Cloud Platform product that allows developers to store and query large amounts of data. We chose BigQuery because it can analyze multi-terabyte data sets with billions of headers to deliver precise results in just a few seconds.

The post theorizes about what kind of situations Gmail log search could be used for, for those of you who aren’t sure why such a feature is useful. While general questions like “What happened to the inbound/outbound message?” are presented, perhaps the most important one–“Was a message sent to my domain and marked as spam?”–is essential for those businesses that employ email marketing and aren’t receiving a great response and/or open rate. If you find out the mailing was marked as spam, you can adjust your email marketing strategy accordingly.

Google indicates the increased functionality is available now for Google Apps for Business customers. Those belonging to the Education and Government customer base can expect to see Gmail log search in “the next few weeks.”

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