Mail history

[peterchu]

We use the RH and send the mail through the sendmail service , I want to check the mail log , where can I find the send mail log to check the mail history ? thx.

[Alexander Chuzhoy · Accepted solution]

it's /var/log/maillog

while by default each user gets mail
to /var/mail/username

[peterchu]

thx alex , is there other files because I check it already ? thx.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

What exactly do you want to check/audit ?

[Steven E. Protter]

Unless you've changed logging all mail activity should go through /var/log/maillog

service sendmail status

Is it running?

When I monitor mail traffic I use this command.

tail -f /var/log/maillog , gives you the real time look.

SEP

[peterchu]

yes , it /var/log/maillog is ok , i found my mail , but the history i want to check is long time ago so I didn't find it at this log , so I ask whether any other log in the system ? thx.

[Mark Grant]

This will depend on the distribution. For example, On re-boot my mail log is moved to "maillog.X" with X being a number. A new maillog starts being written to.

If you don't have any other maillog type files in /var/log then I'm afraid you're going to have to restore them from backup. You DO have a backup don't you?

[Paul Cross_1]

look at your /etc/syslog.conf file. Redhat defaults to /var/log/maillog, but of course you can change it and put it anywhere you like.

from the /etc/syslog.conf file on redhat 7.3:

# Log all the mail messages in one place.
mail.* /var/log/maillog

[Vernon Brown_4]

The default log-rotate saves about 4 weeks of maillog files. They will be maillog.1, maillog.2 maillog.3, and maillog.4.

All in /var/log/

Vern

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

well, with RHL out-of-the-box you will see logs for the last month.

you can save logs for months/years if you have enough disk space, just edit

/etc/logrotate.conf

and/or

/etc/logrotate.d/service_name