Sendmail message ID

[Stuart Powell]

I am using mailx in a script to send out a TIF file to external customers. However I want to track the message to ensure that it makes it to the intended customer. Is there a way to have sendmail return the message identifier to mailx when the script sends a message so that I can track the message's status?

[Helen French]

Hi Stuart:

You can keep track of this by looking at the mail log file - /var/adm/syslog/mail.log. This file will give you the sender, receiver and the delivery status of a prticular message.

HTH,
Shiju

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

Message tracking depends up what os / mail system the mail goes through.
In house outlook to outlook OK but for advanced feature like "Delivered" and "Opened" when your mail goes into the big bad world the answer is once again:-

It depends.


Paula

[Stuart Powell]

Shiju,

That is the ID I want to track. However, I may have a quick sequence of multiple messages to the same user. So I need to be able to track each message by the send mail ID.

[Helen French]

Hi Stuart:

Sorry if it didn't help, but the mail.log file carries a unique ID for each mail you send from the system. I thought may be that ID will help you tracking the information.

HTH,
Shiju

[MAD_2]

I know this is probably an addition to traffic and some extra routing, but how about routing it through an Outlook account (creating a rule for your messages -- hopefully there is a way for you to establish some kind of rule) and then setting the Outlook account to track messages for you!

[benoit Bruckert]

Try the -v option,
(verbose - debug), by this way you will know if your message is queued or sent which is a first level !

hope it may help
Benoit

[Stuart Powell]

I appreciate everyone's input. I worked with HP's response center people and changed the plan of attack. Instead of staying with mailx we changed to sendmail. I embedded the following string in mailing script:
(
echo "From: baaninv"
echo "To: "$ADDR
echo "Subject: "$SUBJECT
echo "This is a test message with an attachement"
#uuencode /opt/aetfax/merkur/stmt.txt sample.tiff
cat /opt/aetfax/merkur/stmt.txt;uuencode $TFILE $SUB1$SUB2".tif") | /usr/sbin/sendmail -d7.1 $ADDR Fax_Admin@aetinc.com
The variable $ADDR is the intended desitnation
$SUBJECT is the character string that we want to show up on the subject line of the message.
$TFILE is a TIF file that we convert with uuencode to an attachment name determined by $SUB1 & $SUB2 (one of which is an invoice number).
We tested this today and the attachment can be read. The data returned by this message sequence includes the sendmail message ID from SENDMAIL on the host.

Once again, thanks for the input.