The sys admin’s daily grind: SendmailAnalyzer

Troop Visit

Article from Issue 149/2013
Author(s):

During the ongoing battle against spam, admins should inspect their troop’s battle lines from time to time. If you don’t relish the thought of counting the dinnerware, you can use the services of a logfile inspector like SendmailAnalyzer, which works surprisingly well with Postfix and the like.

I ran Sendmail 8.7 on the first mail server I operated for a large group of users, and it was hate at first sight. I kept up this War of the Roses until 8.9.0 and later moved to Postfix. In the years that followed, I lost track of the Sendmail Server Analyzer. It was not until I read a small post online that I understood that SendmailAnalyzer also can evaluate Postfix logs and messages from Amavisd-new, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, Postgrey, and other MTA appendages. High time to try out the tool.

SendmailAnalyzer comes as a sleek tar.gz package and relies on the existence of Perl and the GD libraries. After the install, you need to set up a cronjob to take care of data caching. The analyzer itself can run in the foreground or as a system service; the developers have kindly included start/ stop scripts to match. The configuration is handled in the sendmailanalyzer.conf file, although command-line parameters are also possible. The most important setting is right at the top of the configuration file.

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