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I'm using GNU Mailman with Postfix to run a mailing list, and would like to monitor the delivery of outgoing mail, that is: for each mail sent from the list, check whether a 250 (OK) message was answered, and if not, report back to me.

For now, I'm doing a quick-and-dirty:

# cat /var/log/syslog | grep "smtp.*to=.*" | grep -v 250

Is there a clean way to monitor smtpd's output?

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  • 2
    Surely this must be a useless use of cat? At the very least you can do grep "smtp.*to=.*" /var/log/syslog | grep -v 250
    – user
    Jan 21, 2014 at 13:36
  • 4
    Personally I find that crusade a bit pedantic in most contexts and prefer the OP's more readable, modular format
    – jchook
    Nov 2, 2019 at 20:18

6 Answers 6

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8

There is no way to monitor the sent mails in a clean way. You can only grep the details from the maillog of postfix.

Here is an example: 

log='logfile of postfix'
grep "status=sent" $log | \
egrep -ve 'postfix/(cleanup|pickup|master|qmgr|smtpd|local|pipe)'

And also avoid the logs for dkim etc. If you need the count of mails then pipe on wc -l at the end.

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3

How about:

multitail -eX "smtp.*to=<(.*)>.*sent.*250" './bin/received' -f /var/log/maillog

./bin/received is a shell script that gets the destination email address as a parameter and does something with it.

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1

try this 

cat /var/log/maillog |grep -v "relay=local" |grep "relay=" |grep "status=sent"

you will find very helpful info here http://en.redinskala.com/postfix-maillog-interpretation/

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1
  • Why are you using smart quotes? They won't work.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Oct 19, 2016 at 16:53
1

You can use pflogsumm to get an overview of entries in the logs:

cat /var/log/mail.log | pflogsumm 

Grand Totals
------------
messages

     26   received
     25   delivered
      0   forwarded
      0   deferred
      2   bounced
      0   rejected (0%)
      0   reject warnings
      0   held
      0   discarded (0%)

    752k  bytes received
    751k  bytes delivered
     14   senders
      7   sending hosts/domains
      3   recipients
      3   recipient hosts/domains


Per-Day Traffic Summary
-----------------------
    date          received  delivered   deferred    bounced     rejected
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    May  7 2023         7          7 
    May  8 2023        11         10          0          2 
    May  9 2023         8          8

Another option is Lightmeter which is able to notify you when something happens, although I cannot recommend it.

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0

I am watching who sends email through my server with this:

tail -f /var/log/mail.log | grep 'sasl'

It shows who the authenticated user is who's sending.

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Note that other information than the 250 can still be relevant to what constituted a successful delivery.

For example a successfully sent message that was marked as spam could have a message looking like this:

... status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK DMARC:Quarantine ...)
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