Panix Help System: Procmail Logging

Procmail Logging

By default, our procmail setup script tells procmail to log what it does with your mail to a file in your .procmail directory called log. As noted, if you use the default settings, Panix rotates this log to prevent it from growing too large.

Typically, an entry looks something like this:

From user@example.com  Thu Sep  1 12:45:02 2005
 Subject: Lunch tomorrow?
  Folder: /net/staff/home/youraccnt/.maildir/new/1125593105.7251_1.panix1.pan 1044

By looking at the log, you can see whether a message that you're looking for got to your account.

You may have noticed this line in the .procmailr file:

 
   VERBOSE=off

Should you ever need to figure out exactly what is happning to a message, you can change that setting to

   VERBOSE=on

and bounce the message to yourself. (If you do that, you should set the message aside first and edit out any of the extra headers added by your own mail filtering, or they'll interfere with the processing. You should also modify the message-ID so it isn't exactly like the original. You can easily do this by adding "X" or "was" to the actual ID (inside the angle brackets), so that something like this:

Message-ID: <20051006173459.GA11872@panix.com>

becomes

Message-ID: <was-20051006173459.GA11872@panix.com>

If you turn on verbose logging, you must not forget to turn it off as soon as you've finished testing. Verbose logging can be very verbose, and takes up a great deal of space.

The procmail log can be used in many more sophisticated ways as well. Try man procmailrc for more information.

Procmail index