E-mail

Where and How to Read Sendmail Logs

Where and How to Read Sendmail Logs

Sendmail program keeps up-to-date with the system administrator about mail delivery and forwarding aspects. To maintain the history of all its activities, log all activities using the syslog facility. It also gathered the statistics of all tasks about what it is doing. Recording information, for example, about site connectivity and total message volume, can help the system administrator generate sendmail more efficiently. Through these logs, administrators can also solve message delivery problems between the sender and recipient.

We will explore in this article where and how to read the Sendmail logs in a Linux system.

Sendmail logs location

The Sendmail logs default location varies based on your Linux distribution. The '/var/log' is the location where users can find log files of different services. So, mostly the Sendmail logs located at '/var/log/mail.log' in your Linux system. To access the Sendmail logs, use the following command that will display all logs on the terminal window:

$ sudo cat /var/log/mail.log

The list of logs displays on the terminal.

How to read Sendmail logs?

Most users cannot read or understand the Sendmail logs. Logs messages display in the following format. Each line in logs consists of a timestamp, the machine name that generated this message, the Sendmail word, and message details. Most of the messages in logs are a sequence of names=value pairs. When a message is in the delivery process, the delivery attempt and recipient line are the two most commonly logged lines that are used. The recipient line logs the recipient messages.

These recipient message fields are:

The delivery attempt fields are given below:

Conclusion

In this article, we have explained the brief description of Sendmail logging. We have described how a user can locate logs in the Linux system and understand the Sendmail logs format. That is all about Send mail logging. I hope I have explained all the details in an easy way that will help you.

How to change Left & Right mouse buttons on Windows 10 PC
It's quite a norm that all computer mouse devices are ergonomically designed for right-handed users. But there are mouse devices available which are s...
Emulate Mouse clicks by hovering using Clickless Mouse in Windows 10
Using a mouse or keyboard in the wrong posture of excessive usage can result in a lot of health issues, including strain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and ...
Add Mouse gestures to Windows 10 using these free tools
In recent years computers and operating systems have greatly evolved. There was a time when users had to use commands to navigate through file manager...